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THE 



REJECTED STONE; 



INSURRECTION vs. RESURRECTION 



AMERICA. 



if 



BY A NATIVE OF VIRGINIA. 



^ccontT Etiitian, 



BOSTON: 
WALKER, WISE, AND COMPANY, 

215, Washington Street. 

1862. 







Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1861, by 

WALKER, WISE, AND COMPANY, 

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. 



BOSTON. 
PRINTED BY JOHN WILSON AND SON, 

22, School Street. 



CONTENTS. 



Page. 

I. Union 7 

II. Unmask 9 

III. Pilate 13 

IV. Between us be Truth 15 

V. The Organic Law 19 

VI. The Rejected Stone 23 

VII. Conservation 29 

VIII. Compromise 31 

IX. Broken , . . 43 

X. The Privateer 47 

XI. A Foreign Power . 50 

XII. Manasses 58 

XIII. Beth-el 67 

XIV. A Rebellion vs, a Revolution 75 

XV. EXCALIBUR 84 

XVI. A Felicitation 90 

XVII. To THE President of the United States ... 93 

XVIII. To THE American People 112 

XIX. The Great Method of Peace 116 



PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 



The discussion of the questions of which this little book 
treats, always important, is now eminently so, because the Head 
of the Nation has solemnly invoked the attention of Congress and 
the People to the subject of Slavery as connected with our pre^ 
sent conflict. The victories of our arms, still more this noblest 
victory, — the word "Emancipation" uttered from the White 
House, — make the conditions under which the second edition 
of this work is issued much brighter than those which attended 
its original publication : but the victory is not yet won ; justice is 
not yet accepted for the Head of the Corner. So, with gratitude 
for the reception the volume has met with, I can only welcome 
the demand for another edition ; and, with a prayer that it may 
find out those who need it, speed it on its way. 

MONCURE D. CONWAY. 

Cincinnati, Ohio, March, 1862. 



Lord Bacon recommencis that all important affairs should 
be committed first to Argiis with a hundred eyes, and after- 
ward to Briareus with a hundred arms. " Things," he re- 
marks, " will have their first or second agitation. If they be 
not tossed upon the arguments of counsel, they will be tossed 
upon the waves of fortune." 

The hundi'ed arms have laid hold on the American question : 
whether the hundred eyes have done, or are doing, their work, 
is doubtful. 

The daily press brings to each household its presentation of 
" the situation," in a military aspect ; but the ever-developing 
moral and historical situation is much neglected, or, for reasons 
of state, suppressed. 

"Make bright the arrows," said the Hebrew prophet. In 
this age, still more m this controversy, every weapon must 
think, every missile be winged with intelligence, every shell be 
fused with fire from God's altar. 

It is with a profound conviction that the event of this war is 
to depend more upon the impregnability of principles than that 
of fortresses, and that it must be fought from a higher plane 
than any yet occupied by our forces ere it can be won, that I 
offer the following suggestions and discussion to the American 
people. 



THE REJECTED STONE. 



I. 

UNION. 

In the popular mind, the brave sufferings of our past, 
the fruitions of our present, and the visions of our 
future, as a people, are baptized and consecrated in the 
name of Union. The very word has thus become a 
talisman, which, because so long supposed to contain 
all the secret of our national health and wealth, has 
gained the command of all the living forces of the New 
World. The good and strong men who haVe arraigned 
the Union have done so critically, not virtually ; and 
now, when the question is no longer on the exegesis of 
Mr. Hamilton's or Mr. Randolph's remarks in the Con- 
vention of '87, but on the right of eminent domain in 
this country, or any portion of this country, as between 
Barbarism and Civilization, there is but one party pos- 
sible among loyal men, — that which would preserve 
the Union. 

But it must be candidly acknowledged in the outset, 
that, in the sense of the politicians, there is no Union 



8 THE REJECTED STONE. 

to be preserved. 'Tis only a sad satire to call States 
"United/' wherein that which is felt on one side to 
be the blot on the national escutcheon is maintained 
on the other as the governor of the national machinery. 
It is questionable whether the people mean, by their 
effort to " save the Union/' the same that is meant by 
some of their proxies. Do they mean thereby the pre- 
servation of the right at the South to imprison Northern 
seamen and landsmen accused of no crime? Do our 
half-million bayonets gleam to-day to defend and pre- 
serve the right to nail up Northern freemen in tar- 
barrels, and roll them into the Mississippi River ? Is it, 
in short, the Union as it was that the people have with 
one voice declared must and shall be preserved ? 

It is only a short time since compromises were 
proposed and seriously considered by the American 
people. They were deliberately rejected, even when 
the manifest alternative was civil war. Why rejected ? 
Our people have not been given to scruples against 
compromise : they had many interests which civil war 
would ruin. These compromises were rejected, and 
the most unimportant guaranties refused, simply because 
of the utter worthlessness of what they were to pur- 
chase; i.e., the Union as then existing. The only prom- 
ise offered in response to Northern concession was, that 
things just as they were should remain undisturbed and 
immutable. But the people of this country had maturely 
decided that the present edition of the country was not 
worth stereotyping. Indeed, if it were generally un- 



UNMASK. 



derstood that the power of our Constitution naturally 
results or culminates in any one condition of things 
which the country has yet known, it is doubtful, if, in 
the Free States, there would be found ten men unright- 
eous enough to save it. In fact as far as the old Union 
is concerned, the only arms now defending it are in the 
South : and they have reason ; for it was possessed by 
the demon of the South, its proper soul drugged into 
torpor, supposed by many dead. 



II. 

UNMASK. 



The native glow of the human heart is always for 
justice. Men have not paeans and hymns and celebra- 
tion-days for epochs when Wrong triumphed over Right. 
So Tyranny has found it necessary to incloud the glow 
of heaven in man, which would else melt every chain. 

There is a legend of a youth, who, at a masquerade, 
became interested to know a certain mask This one 
he pursued everywhere, the figure being equally intent 
on eluding him. From room to room, from corridor to 
corridor, he followed. It mounted the stairway; his 
feet were swift after it. At length, in a deserted cham- 
ber, far away from the music and the dancing, he 



10 THE REJECTED STONE. 

overtook, and unmasked it with a kiss ; but what it was 
that turned and glared upon him he could never bring 
his pallid hps to utter, — only that it was a thing not of 
flesh and blood ! So have we followed the figure cos- 
tumed with the stars and stripes, wearing the mask of 
Union. Far away from the music and the dance, into 
the deserted chambers, we followed with heedless infa- 
tuation. It is our very kiss that has unmasked it. 
God ! what monster has been moving in our midst, and 
touching our hands, under this alluring costume ! 

Now we see that this Union, whatever those who 
made it meant it should be, has become the hollow 
mask of Slavery. 

The present Secretary of State, just before entering 
his office as such, said to some friends calling upon him, 
"Let every man now devote himself to saving the 
Union.'' — "With liberty in it," suggested one in the 
company. " Liberty is always in the Union," replied 
the future Premier. But so soon as he himself comes 
into the Union with a little finger of authority, held only 
in the name of Liberty, that Union vanishes like a 
pricked bubble. 

At that recent period, no Union but upon a slavery 
basis, pure and simple, was regarded as possible. Mark 
thfe facts. 

Our Republican President himself, elected by a people 
fondly dreaming that Liberty might be allowed at least 
an occasional angel's visit to the White House, pleaded 
earnestly with the South to remain in the Union, on the 



UNMASK. 11 

ground, that, if the Union should go, Slavery must go 
with it. 

The leading men of this administration joined in the 
warning and appeal, arguing with clearness and force 
that the Union was the only remaining fetter on four 
millions of human beings. 

''What," said the Secretary of State, — "what but 
the obligations of the Constitution can prevent the 
antislavery sentiment of this country from assuming at 
once the European type, — direct emancipation ? " 

Coincident were the appeals of clerical Unionists in 
the North to the Southern wings of their churches. 
The rivets of your slave's manacle are one with the 
rivets of the Union ! " Separated from the North," 
wrote Dr. Hodge in the Princeton Review, " a South- 
ern Confederacy of the Cotton-growing States would be 
at the mercy of the antislavery feeling of the world." 
Dr. Eliot, born and reared in Massachusetts, minister 
of the Unitarian Church in St. Louis, implores, in the 
name of Slavery, that Missouri shall resist Disunion : 
" Separate Missouri from the Union," he said, " surround 
her with hostile Free States, and in five years the num- 
ber of those held to involuntary service would be 
exceedingly small." 

Did the American people know, as they watched with 
pride their colors floating from the mast where they 
had nailed them, that those colors were the only ones 
on earth which could still protect the slave-ship? Yet 
it is even so. England and France stand able and will- 



12 THE REJECTED STONE. 

ing to prevent the slave-trade : but the slave-interest of 
our country has gained a stern prohibition of the right 
of searching our vessels ; and now any pirate has only 
to run up the stars and stripes over the smooth deck to 
protect the horrors of the middle passage underneath. 
On the 26th of February last, Lord John Russell said 
in the British Parliament, '^ This flag '' (the American) 
^' has covered a vast importation of slaves. If the Spa- 
nish flag had been shown, our cruisers would at once 
have seized the vessels ; but, as they bore American 
colors, it was impossible to do so." 

Of every other flag that floats under heaven, you may 
be sure that it does not cover the traffic in human 
beings. Of thine, Union ! we cannot even yet say 
whether it is protecting a nation's honor or a world's 
shame. 

Think of it, my masters ! 

Think of America fitted out in the order of God as 
the Life-ship of Nations ; of America with a broad con- 
tinent for her deck, mountain-ribbed to match any 
billows, launched forth to respond to the signals that 
come up from voyagers that can struggle no longer ; of 
America, her true captain chained below, turned aside 
by mutineers from the perishing to whom she was sent, 
flaring in the eyes of the world the black flag of the 
slaver ! 

Reader, you know how it is at sea when the first big 
ground-swells come : the passengers mutually disclose 
what they have been dining on. The Union is always 



PILATE. 13 

called the Ship of State ; and the figure was never so 
appropriate as now^ when she has got out here amid 
the swelling waves of the popular heart, the fresh gales 
of Freedom filling her sails and snapping her flag, and 
all the churches and the parties seized with deadly sea- 
sickness. There is no doubt now what they've all been 
fattening on. The vomit is black. We find that the 
churches have been retaliating upon the native Afri- 
can's fondness for " cold missionary," with an equal 
devotion to pickled Ethiopian • and that the loaves and 
fishes at Washington have invariably been eaten with 
African sauce. 

Thus, then, we have overtaken the Mask. 

Of a truth, we have discovered it a thing not of flesh 
and blood. 

It is over that Union, with its mask fallen, that a 
raven hovers to-day, with its one Avord, — ^^ Never- 
more ! " 



III. 
PILATE. 



Vainly has this nation re-enacted the part of Pilate 
in his court. The king sat with the robe of power 
about him, and gave up Jesus to the mob. Then he 
calls for a basin of water, and, washing his hands 



2 



14 THE REJECTED STONE. 

therein, declares, " I am innocent of the blood of this 
just person: see ye to it." 

Does that absolve the man whose business on that 
throne is to protect the innocent ? The verdict of the 
world is sure in the end. For fifty generations, Chris- 
tendom has gone on repeating, '' He suffered wider 
Pontius Pilate J ^ 

So this nation, sitting on the throne, and surrendering 
Humanity to the tyrant and the pirate, has again and 
again washed its hands and proclaimed its innocence. 
Relentless posterity will all the same affirm that Hu- 
manity suffered under the Pilates — Democratic and 
Republican — who have ruled in the nation and in the 
States of the nation, and will not spend a thought on 
the political basins in which their hands are washed. 

The damned spot is in every palm : there is not water 
enough in all the rivers and lakes of America to wash 
it out. The time will come when we shall be eager to 
pour into the basin our hearts' blood, and seek in that 
to cleanse our hands of the stain fallen on us from the 
sacred hands we have nailed and the side we have 
pierced. 

Henceforth, brother, if we must be devils, at least 
we can be honest devils ; and if any craven priest or 
tricky politician tells us that we have nothing to do with 
the crimes of the Union against man, more than with the 
widow-burning of Hindoos or the cannibaHsm of Fiji- 
ans, shall we not at least tell him — in a devout and 
Christian-like way — that he lies ? 



BETWEEN US BE TRUTH. 15 

IV. 

BETWEEN US BE TRUTH. 

Without doubt, the rule of Slavery in the United 
States, which began its wane as the century passed its 
noon, was one legitimate and structural phase of the 
country. It was the result of certain compromises 
made by its builders ; and freemen had either to endure 
it as best they could, or, as some of the bravest did, 
take sides with the stone which the builders rejected, 
against the whole fabric. But can any man in his 
senses imagine that men fresh from a revolution for 
Freedom would have stooped to that narrow gate and 
straitened way, unless they had seen, or thought they 
saw, the spacious halls of Liberty in the distance? 
Would they then and there have for ever sealed the 
doom of their new-born nation's independence ? Nail- 
ing up a Republican in a barrel, and rolling him into 
the river, would then be only a symbol of what our 
fathers did for the whole nation of Republicans. Had 
the Union been the mere petrifaction of its most rudi- 
mental and unripe condition, a contract for the ever- 
lasting retention of its tottering infancy, a compact 
generating no power of self-conservation amid the emer- 
gencies of the future, then the nation would have 
kicked it off as a Chinese shoe, or limped with prema- 
ture decrepitude to pay, ere its minority had passed, 



16 THE EEJECTED STONE. 

the debt of Nature, — dissolution. Everywhere the 
hmit of growth is the inauguration of death. But 
the conservative principle in the Constitution was the 
resource of power which it contained. The people 
accepted the grub actual with the golden wings implied ; 
and now, when the period of change has come, — now, 
when the chrysalid throbs with the power Avhicli for- 
bids it longer to creep, — Slavery steps forward, and 
cries, ^' In the Devil's name, creep for ever, or be 
crushed for ever ! '' 

True, we agreed to the worm. It was not quite 
noble ; but Ave did it, and grievously have we answered 
it. But this, through all, Avas our apology to the 
humanity we consented to wrong, — this the one solace 
to our own hearts in their pain and shame : '^ The worm 
is no common Avorm, but one Avith an inherent poAver 
and right to climb to Avings. For the beautiful day of 
its soaring and freedom, Ave Avill bear Avith its present 
meanness and devastation." 

There is need, that, between the star-spangled banner 
and the stars Avith bars, a standard higher than either 
should be lifted, and on it the ancient motto of the 
Love that is too great to conciliate, — " Between us be 
Truth.'' 

When the people of the South consented to the pre- 
sent Constitution, they gained some immediate benefits 
for Slavery, as Ave have seen; but no less did they 
consent to the possible abrogation of every refuge and 
cover under AAdiich Slavery Avas permitted to hide. 



BETWEEN US BE TRUTH. 17 

Accepting that instrument, they consented not only to 
the election of Abraham Lincoln, but to that of Wen- 
dell Phillips, if three-fourths of the American people 
should so much desire such a result as to change the Con- 
stitution, so that Mr. Phillips could swear to support it. 
South Carolina, in adopting that Constitution, pledged 
her allegiance to a power which could abolish Slavery 
throughout the land. For doing all these things, the 
Constitution contains definite formulas and methods, in 
its power, by a sufficient majority, to supplant its own 
provisions. Who does not know, unless it be a Seces- 
sionist, that this power in any constitution, of alteration 
and adaptation, is the measure of its lease of life ? 
England has floated down like an ark over the social 
deluges of centuries, because her constitution was un- 
written, and able to grow with the growing world. 
'' England," said Brougham, " has survived, because she 
knew when to bend.'^ 

In its susceptibility of amendment, the Constitution 
recognizes the Higher Law, — the only law that never 
fails to be executed. 

An ancient code provided the penalty of death for 
any one who should propose any alteration of its pro- 
visions : the proposer should die, even though his 
alteration should be adopted. And yet proposers came, 
and their dying breath winnow^ed that code in every 
particular. Our Constitution contains no such bloody 
barrier to its improvement, though the Apollyon of 
Lynch-law has sought to extemporize one even in the 

2* 



18 THE EEJECTED STONE. 

Senate-chamber. Whilst wisely securing thoroughness 
in every radical change, by demanding a majority large 
enough to place such change beyond suspicion of acci- 
cent or caprice, our fathers left a doorway for the 
higher laws which higher civilization must from age to 
age enact. Had there been no such doorway, the Avails 
would have been long ago battered in under the steady 
siege of Civihzation. 

Observe, then, men and brethren, that, in forming 
this govermnent. Slavery clutched at the strength of 
the hour ; Freedom relied on the inviolable justice of the 
ages. They have both had, they must have, their 
reward. That it was and is thus, is apparent from the 
very clauses under which Slavery claims eminent do- 
main in this country : they are all written as for an 
institution passing aw^ay. The sources of it are sealed 
up, so far as they could be ; and all the provisions for 
it — the crutches by which it should limp as decently 
as possible to its grave — were so worded, that, when 
Slavery should be buried, no dead letter would stand 
in the Constitution as its epitaph. It is even so. No 
historian, a thousand years hence, could show from that 
instrument that a single slave was ever held under it. 



THE ORGANIC LAW. 19 

V. 

THE ORGANIC LAW. 

When the Secretary of State said, ^^ Liberty is always 
in the Union,'' ^ it was a truth in the guise of indirection. 
But let us not be misled into supposing the Constitu- 
tion to be the fortress of Freedom, apart from those who 
occupy it. Except for the equal right of occupation by 
the portal of the ballot which it gives to the friends of 
Freedom, its every gun can be wheeled around against 
Liberty with much more ease than against Slavery. If 
the present agitation should do no more than bring 
about a free and frank discussion of our organic law, 
and suggest the exigent demand for its improvement, 
it will be worth more than it has yet cost us, or is 
likely to. There has existed heretofore a popular delu- 
sion, that the absolute and divine right of kings has in 
America been simply transferred to a paper king ; that 
the Constitution is an inspired document, dealing with 
every interest of its own or our or any time with ex- 
haustive generalization. " Who can tell," said Cicero, 
'' but that the people may come to believe that these 
stones and pictures are the gods themselves?" Just 
that came to pass. So the provisions of our Constitu- 
tion, which our fathers themselves acknowledged as 
necessarily partial, and in many regards temporizing, 
are confused by the majority of our people with abso- 
lute laws, and worshipped accordingly. 



20 THE REJECTED STONE. 

But, outside of mythologies, Minervas in full armor 
do not spring from the skulls even of Joves (and, in 
the remote antiquity of our origin, — some sixty or 
seventy years back, — all American statesmen become 
Joves). 

History and society repeat nothing more constantly 
than the maxim of natural science, Nihil per saltum. 

The Declaration of Independence has been called 
a series of ^^ glittering generalities." Low as was the 
spirit in which this phrase was uttered, it is certainly 
true in a most important sense. That Declaration was 
a study of the millennium; and that does not bloom on 
the sapling of one revolution, nor of a thousand. Hu- 
man brotherhood is in it : the instruments are scarcely 
invented — surely not tuned — to render that sym- 
phony. The men who announced those auroral theo- 
ries of human rights went home to buy and sell their 
human chattels as before. The French proverb says, 
^^When the saint's day is over, farcAvell the saint." 
The signers of that Declaration did but make us a 
saint's day ; and it is to our credit that we rejoice in 
it more than in all the days whose transactions became 
the rafters of the house we live in. 

It was a " pattern shown in the mount," after which 
all things in the plain below were to be fashioned; but 
no sooner have the tables of the law been given, and 
the lightnings of revolution amid which they were an- 
nounced sheathed, than the prosaic exigencies of the 
hour asserted their qualifying clauses. God is great : 



THE ORGANIC LAW. 21 

Moses can approach him ; a golden calf is more com- 
prehensible to the multitude. 

So the fiery Declaration cooled down to the wise and 
wary Constitution. 

It is a maxim of natural science, that things move 
violently out of their places, calmly in them. Omi- 
nous warnings are found in Washington's ^^ Farewell 
Address;" and our earliest state-papers show that fears 
of a divorce were expressed at the marriage -altar; 
which indicate that the equilibrium of elements was 
even then felt to be imperfect. Under the increasing 
agitations, the popular mind has been so Union-besotted, 
that it has gone blindly, deeper and deeper, into the 
danger it meant to avoid by clinging to the Union. 
As an ideal, Ave should have been guided by it to a 
solid shore : as an idol, we have drifted with it on the 
breakers. 

We may well ponder agitations which report things 
out of their places. For example, Democracy is the 
people governing themselves, — that is, making their 
own institutions ; but the provision for the rendition 
of fugitives binds upon the citizens of Free States, to 
a certain extent, an institution they have abrogated. 
It is like forcing a horse to live upon fish. Then, 
again. Democracy must have equal rights as an atmo- 
spheric condition ; but, by the constitutional basis of 
representation, the vote of a large slaveholder may 
balance that of two or three blocks of a Northern 
city. 



22 THE REJECTED STONE. 

These elements, and one or two more that might be 
named, are out of their places in a republic ; and much 
of the agitation of recent years may be attributed to 
the effort of the newly awakened forces of the New 
World to classify themselves more naturally. But let 
us not be misunderstood here. The political situation 
of the parties to the present war does not depend in the 
slightest degree upon any defects in the Constitution. 
The North goes to the battle-field with a record of con- 
stitutional obedience clearer than some of her best 
friends could wish it. She has bowed her back to the 
heaviest burdens that could be constitutionally imposed 
upon her. She has been put to shame in her own 
gates, through long, weary years ; and consented to toil 
on toward her day of deliverance by the slow, pre- 
scribed paths. Fulfilling the hard legal conditions. 
Freedom had climbed the hill Difiiculty raised in her 
path by the Constitution itself, and was near to the 
gates of the beautiful palace Success, when Apollyon, 
mad with envy and hate, broke through his own limits, 
and prepared his darts at the very door of the chamber 
named Peace. The constitutional disparagements of 
Liberty have indeed roused Liberty to higher exer- 
tions. She has been more in earnest than if a freeman's 
vote had been equal to a slaveholder's. The shame of 
repelHng the fugitive from her door has nerved her 
to the atonement she is now ready to make by the 
shedding of blood ; but there has been no evasion, 
no overleaping of conditions, no cutting of knots she 



THE REJECTED STONE. . 23 

had agreed to untie. Boston saw the skeleton of 
George III. exhumed, bone refitted to bone, and the 
grinnmg skull crowned in her Court House, — this so 
often as she surrendered her fellow-citizens to slavery ; 
Cincinnati saw the Tour de Nesle rebuilt ; Ohio, under 
a Republican governor, held the clothes of those who 
stoned Margaret Garner and her children to death, and 
said, " Her blood be upon us and our children." 

No ! Slavery now appeals to arms, because Freedom, 
in her slow but steady progress, has left no informality, 
no flaw, which can be seized on to reverse the deci- 
sion she has gained in any higher court. 



VI. 

THE REJECTED STONE. 

It is the inestimable gain of our present condition, 
that we have come to perceive a weak point in our 
organic law, — a stone left out, and that a fundamental 
one. 

A disease in any body always flies to the weakest point 
of that body, and thus proves what is its weakest point. 

Chase the fox, and it will show you the hole in your 
wall. 

On either theory of the Constitution, that which 
binds it back for ever to the shell it is ready to cast, or 



24 THE EEJECTED STONE. 

that which empowers it to struggle up with the strug- 
gUng world, — conserving its principle of life in its 
principle of growth, — our nation's present emergency 
brings the whole country to the stone which the build- 
ers rejected ; announcing the irreversible decree, that 
either w^e must be Avrecked upon that stone, or else 
that it must be taken as the head of the corner. 

That stone is, essentially, Justice. 

The form in which it stands for us is THE African 

SLAVE. 

The ethnologic African is nothing to us here, nor his 
place in the scale, nor yet his capacity. Our fact lies in 
this, that he is inevitably the third party in any con- 
tract that can be made between the North and the 
South. He must be presently recognized as a party to 
the contract, who has already demonstrated his power 
to tear it in pieces. We have already had our expe- 
rience ; and, if we do not profit by it, 'tis our own loss. 
Men who leap from precipices do not imperil the law of 
gravitation. Obey the truth, and it comes a life-giving 
sunbeam out of heaven ; disobey, and it comes all the 
same, but now a deadly sun-stroke. 

When our national firm was consolidated, the Afri- 
can's name was left off the sign, as his right was left 
out of the compact ; but every year has shown his in- 
creasing power in that firm. It is plain, he can be no 
longer considered even a silent partner. The thunder 
of his voice mutters under every home in the South 
to-day. They who hear it turn pale, and say, " Your 



THE REJECTED STONE. 25 

ijiition is nothing, and worse than nothing, to ns, unless 
it resolve itself into a police-force for the protection of 
Slavery. So soon as the monster is denied its daily 
virgin, it turns to crush us.'' 

Fearful is their sincerity ! What they say is credible, 
as the last words of the dying. Unless the organic law 
is so amended as to nationalize the code of Slavery, to 
adopt and foster the institution, the South feels herself 
to be, and is, in the midst of advancing society, like the 
prisoner of the Inquisition amidst the ever-encroaching 
walls of his dungeon, who could compute the minute 
when they must crush him between them. 

And to the North the warning of the African is 
equally imperative. The North has walked behind to 
strengthen those who sho,t their arrows at him, but has 
found that every arrow was from a Tartar bow: it 
has returned from its flight to plunge into those who 
thought to find security in the rear. The North has, 
in these last years, become a funeral procession fol- 
lowing the hearses on which lie a fallen Literature, a 
tainted Ermine, a putrid Church. On the scholars and 
the orators, Slavery has brought the plague of the black- 
tongue. 

The Devil's year draws to a close. Bring out the 
ledgers ! See, for every man bought and sold in the 
South, one was bought and sold in the North ! 

It is simply useless to accuse the builders on account 
of their rejection of this stone : it was too large for 



26 THE REJECTED STONE. 

them to lift. Have we not been dismayed by it ? have 
we not from year to year shrunk from it also ? The 
exigencies of a new and infant nation, requiring before 
any thing else the necessities of national life and de- 
fence, - forbade the adjustment of any such question. 
The true reason why this work was adjourned to us is 
its commanding extent and grandeur. For those who 
see in this problem a question of the Negro race, its 
power or weakness, can do little more than bear a 
hod for the edifice that is to rise upon this Head of the 
Corner. 

Ages of wrong have, like cold, hard glaciers, graven 
on this lowly stone the sacred signs of the laws that 
cannot be broken. Now it stands m our midst the 
touchstone of every virtue. 

There is a print as of nails in the African's hands, 
and a hollow wound in his side ; and, though as a sheep 
before his shearers he is dumb, a voice comes from 
behind him, saying, ^^ What for this least one of my 
brothers you do or do not, you do or do not for me." 

The Slavery question is to take many years yet ; for 
it involves the most transcendent laws that infold the 
earth, — eternal laws of justice and humanity, which 
have not yet risen, but have only lit up the morning- 
stars which sing of a new creation. That sneer so 
lately heard on the street, about " the eternal nigger/' 
is not without its significance : to America he has been, 
and must continue to be, eternal, — even if his race 
should perish from the planet. Our relations to the 



THE REJECTED STONE. 27 

Negro make him for us the sign of eternal justice and 
inviolable honor. The gift derives its sacredness from 
the altar. The more lowly and incompetent that race, 
the more sacred its cause to all loyal men. His plea the 
Negro can only utter by the tongue or pen of other 
races ; but his silence is more eloquent than any tongue 
or pen. He is absent from our pews ; he is unfit for our 
parlors : but his absence bears a more withering rebuke 
to the wrong that has held him down in the ascending 
world, than his presence. He can only sign his plea 
with his cross-mark ; but it is the indictment of human- 
ity itself against us; and that sign of the cross affixed is 
the double seal of his ignorance, and of the inhumanity 
which has caused it. Thus the black man withdraws 
before the universality of his issue, which becomes that 
between absolute right and wrong. The verdict he 
claims is the verdict of man as against the oppression 
of a class. 

Even if we cannot all see that his issue is that of the 
whole world, we have surely found that it is that of 
every race comprised in America. In our grief, we 
remember the warning of St. Pierre, that '^ man never 
puts a chain about his brother's neck, but God is sure 
to put the other end of it around his own." In our 
first Revolution, we saw that the right to take one pound 
implied the right to take a thousand : we have required 
another to reveal that the right to enslave four millions 
implies the right to enslave thirty Again and again 
we have shoved aside the importunate, widowed Africa, 



28 THE REJECTED STONE. 

who came with shackled hand upHfted in petition ; and, 
now that she troubleth us^ we may avenge her. Her 
cause has become our own. 

Therefore we would avenge her ; but would we do 
her justice ? 

At this moment, we are inviting the thunderbolt of 
subjugation by separating our own issue in the war from 
that of the African as far as possible. This day, 
were our part of this difficulty settled by the rebels 
grounding their arms, there would be no difficulty, as 
far as our rulers are concerned, in consolidating the 
Union over the prostrate form of the Negro. 

But the rebels have no thought of grounding their 
arms ; nor will they, until they see flashing in the sun- 
light a certain sword which yet sleeps in its scabbard. 
And it may be long yet before that sword is un- 
sheathed. For to do justice to the Negro is to lay the 
corner-stone of the Republic of Man. It is nothing less. 
Therefore this crisis is the most solemn hour that Eter- 
nity has dialled on Time ; and ages past and coming 
meet here, and stand unveiled and expectant. 



CONSERVATION. 29 

VII. 
CONSERVATION. 

The preservation of the Union, which is the task 
now assigned the American people, and of which, 
fortunately, the evasion is harder than the accomplish- 
ment, must necessarily, at first, take the form of disin- 
tegration. With destruction all life begins. The birth 
of the germ is the death of the seed. The Union is 
under compulsion to find its life by losing it. When 
the sides of a seed-shell have fallen apart, sundered by 
the springing germ, vainly shall you endeavor to rivet 
them together again, and remake the old seed : they can 
be re-united only by becoming loam for the new form to 
which they have given birth. Every form, in any king- 
dom of Nature, contains the necessity of its decay as a 
form, in the germ of its perpetuity as an essence. 

This is a key to the startling evolutions which have 
so befogged the empirics, and before which the donkeys 
have not yet found presence of mind enough to bray. 
How is it, that under the banner which is inscribed 
^' Save the Union " are suddenly found the leaders 
whose lives have been consecrated to the destruction 
of the Union in the interest of Freedom ? Mr. Everett 
does not yet comprehend his strange proximity to Mr. 
Phillips; and the ^^ New- York Herald" is confounded 

3* 



30 THE REJECTED STONE. 

at finding itself under the same flag with the " Anti- 
slavery Standard." It is because until now the phrase 
" saving the Union " was the scarecrow of cowardice : 
now 'tis the watchword of heroism. It meant last 
year the fatal policy of fostering the ulcer that was 
eating out the life of the real Union : to-day it means 
to lay the foundation of a nation that shall be perma- 
nent, because founded on the rock of justice. 

The soul of Nature has given one wave of its wand 
over this land ; and, in the presence of this Prospero, 
the semi-brute Caliban and the winged Ariel start forth 
upon one service. All around us are the treacherous 
Calibans growling over the work they are forced to do, 
stung and maddened by the Ariels who sweep on with 
joy to the loyal task whose fulfilment marks the day of 
their own liberation also. 

Do we realize the straits and sorrows to which a 
large class of our felloAv-citizens are reduced ? I refer 
to the large and much-respected class of Sitters on the 
Fence. 

These have come to grief. " Sitting on the fence," 
once the symbol of earthly ease and repose, has now 
become the most distressing of attitudes. 

Constant abrasions on each side have made the Fence 
so razor-like, that one who sits on it is in imminent dan- 
ger of being cut in two. 

In the South, if any one attempts to sit on it, he is 
compelled to ride for eternity upon its top-rail: in the 






COMPROMISE. 31 

North, owing to the recent employment of a distin- 
guished maker of rails to repair the Fence, and the 
consequent shaking, any repose thereon is impossible to 
any politician less skilful than M. Blondin. 



VIII. 

COMPROMISE. 

The agitation of the South in awaking from the stu- 
por into which the Black Drug threw her, when new 
markets raised the price of slaves, learning now, for the 
first time since she signed the Compact, the nature and 
extent of the power wherewith it has all along been in 
gestation, is most natural. 

The instinct of Slavery is wiser than the conscious- 
ness of the Hepublican party, w^hich is so eager to deny 
any dissatisfaction with Slavery where it exists ; oppos- 
ing it only where it doesn't exist. 

The naturalists tell us that every animal knows by 
instinct, and at first sight, the animal that naturally 
preys upon it. The mouse just born, which has never 
seen any animal, will show every sign of terror at sight 
of a cat, whilst calm enough before other animals. The 
instinct of the Southern mouse tells true when it recog- 
nizes that Freedom never yet rested, never can rest, 
quiet with its eye upon a slave. 



32 THE REJECTED STONE. 

It is very plain, that if, in ten years, had the normal 
progress of the country continued, three-fourths of the 
people had been found determined on taking advantage 
of their constitutional authority to abolish Slavery, such 
a result would not have been outside of the ratio in 
which the antislavery sentiment has increased since 
Hale and Julian, twelve years ago, received less than 
two hundred thousand votes on the platform that now 
rules in the Capitol. 

Slavery, with the keen sense of a savage, lays its ear 
to the ground, and hears in those ballots falling for 
Abraham Lincoln the fatal tramp of many centuries, 
the mustering for liberty of the ages that take no step 
backward. It does not pause even to listen to the pro- 
testations of Freedom's picket- guard, that her grand 
army will never invade the sacred soil of constitutional 
oppression ; cares not to inquire whether they are 
honest or otherwise ; knows better ; prepares to defend 
every inch of its bloody deck, every fetter in its coffle. 
Thank God for that savage instinct, which, when as yet 
there was no North, saved us from the deadly evils that 
spring from the making of promises that Fate must for 
ever forbid us to keep ! 

The Republican party was doubtless sincere in its 
eager denial of any intent to interfere with Slavery in 
the States, even through legal and constitutional formu- 
las ; for even our President consented, in his inaugural, 
to offer this filthy coin, shpped by Seward into his 
hand, to purchase a Union, when the very fact of its 



COMPROMISE. 33 

having to be purchased, even with a half-dime, would 
prove it already gone. 

The power which controls the country and the world 
— the power which has put forth ten thousand parties 
like summer-leaves, and shed them when their autumn 
came, itself remaining rooted and fixed in the stratum 
that changes not — has already exculpated the Repub- 
lican party from any suspicion of ulterior intent, by 
raising up a nobler one to take its place. At a little 
town in Ohio, where they had two poles with party-flags 
flying from them, the people, when they heard the boom 
of a shot falling in Fort Sumter, went to the common, 
cut down the two poles, tore away the flags, spliced the 
poles into one, which they raised with one flag on it. 
This is a symbol of a process, which, somewhat more 
slowly, but rapidly enough, has been for some months 
going on with the parties. The electric power of pa- 
triotism is bringing from each some contribution to the 
forces of Liberty. The Republican party needed this 
solvent as well as others. It was no sooner in power 
than it began to go the way of all parties. Hear a 
parable thereof 

There was a young man, as the story runs, whose 
mistress was extremely ill. Anxious and distressed, he 
went forth to seek a physician able to cure her. On the 
way, he was ofi'ered, and purchased at a large price, a 
talisman, which had the magic quality of revealing to 
its possessor all disembodied spirits. With this he ap- 
proached the doors of the most distinguished physicians 



34: THE REJECTED STONE. 

of Paris. All above and about their doors, he saw, by 
the aid of his talisman, the ghosts of those who had 
departed this life under their practice. Spirits with 
pill-boxes, spirits with syringes, with lancets, with wet 
sheets, all spurted, and cut at, and sought to douse, the 
unconscious doctors, whenever they appeared at their 
doors. Presently the young man, after wandering in 
despair from door to door of the celebrities, paused be- 
fore that of a physician, over which he saw two — "only 
two — very mild-seeming spirits. The contrast with the 
doors of other doctors pleased him. '^ Here," he said, 
'^ must be an able physician. Only two have died under 
his charge ; and they may have been too far gone before 
he was called in." The young man entered, and told 
his fear and distress : '^ sir ! " he cried, '^ my only hope 
is in you." — " And why," asked the happy doctor, " do 
you trust in me?" — '^ Ah," replied the youth, unwill- 
ing to mention his talisman, '^ have I not heard your re- 
putation for success in difficult cases bruited throughout 
the city?" — ^' Good heavens ! " exclaimed the astounded 
doctor, — '^ my reputation ! Why, I have not been in 
Paris but eight days, and never had but two patients 
in my life ! " The young man remembered the two he 
had seen over the door, and rushed from the room in 
despair. 

No wonder the country hurried away from such spirit- 
haunted doors as those of Dr. Democrat, Dr. Whig, and 
Dr. Know-nothing. But, over Dr. EepubHcan's door, 
there was a ghost before he had been in Washington a 



COMPROMISE. 35 

week ; and lie never had but one patient in his hfe. He 
inaugurated his practice in that city by proposing to 
the States to adopt, as a part of the Constitution, the 
most essentially unrepublican feature that could be 
inserted in any organic code ; namely, a fetter binding 
the people for ever from any alteration of their Consti- 
tution as it concerns Slavery in the States. Jeff. Davis 
will never give this nation so deadly a stab as would the 
adoption of that provision by the people. In twenty- 
five years, the very swords which now defend the Union 
would be turned toward its heart. 

If Compromise — that old serpent ever coiling about 
the tree of life — has been baffled this time, it is not 
because the party in power did not yield to his seduc- 
tions. Enough secret correspondence Avent on at Wash- 
ington, which it will, for a long time, be '^ incompatible 
with pubhc (i.e. Cabinet) interest " to pubhsh. (Alas ! 
we need it not : the ^^ Campbell and Seward Letters " 
are already too much !) It now appears that the ser- 
pent only desired time to wound our heel. Four months 
he got, against the protest of the nation, and planted his 
fang just where he aimed. 

A compromise with the South has now been shown as 
impossible as a compact with a maniac. It is all the 
more so when the maniac has a method in his madness, 
and a sufficient reason for it. 

Are men fit to lead and rule the forces now roused 
into action in this country, who talk of " this wanton and 
unnecessary rebellion '' ? Stupid ! 



36 THE EEJECTED STONE. 

There never was a more religiously earnest, delibe- 
rate, consistent, and necessary rebellion. Is it not as 
much the nature and mission of the thorns to spring up 
and choke the good seed sown in their midst, as it is 
the nature and mission of the honest soil to bring forth 
thirty, sixty, or a hundred fold? Slavery has never 
departed from its normal development. Its exaspera- 
tion is the legitimated result of the exasperation of 
Freedom. It is always the sun itself that calls up the 
cloud that would obscure it. 

'^ The South has been told lies about us and our de- 
signs." Not at all. The South understands us better 
than we do ourselves. They see that politicians have 
not awakened the forces that have made them, and 
cannot put them to sleep as they will. They have seen 
a man, with a price set on his head, setting up his " Libe- 
rator " in an attic, with a Negro boy to help him, — now 
dipping his pen to announce the decapitation of Slavery 
under the guillotine erected by himself They have 
seen millions kneel and weep at the uplifted scaffold of 
a man who struck at the heart of Slavery, and knew 
better than the cautious Secretary, who said that the 
hero was "justly hung," that, the restraints removed, 
they would have seen then what they saw a week ago, 
— twenty thousand freemen gathered on the spot where 
John Brown died and singing, — 

" May Heaven's smile look kindly down 
Upon the grave of old John Brown ! " 



COMPROMISE. 37 

Already they heard the cartmen and boatmen of New 
York and Boston singing to the ring of steel, — 

" John Brown's knapsack is strapped upon his back ; 
His soul's marching on ! " 

They counted each new face which came to the Senate 
or the House to stand for a principle, which, a few years 
since, it was a disgrace, or worse, to whisper ; until 
from the Illinois grave of Lovejoy, and on the anniver- 
sary of his martyrdom, the conviction for which he died 
was called by two millions of men, and lifted as the 
standard of the nation. 

They have watched, step by step, the steady, unim- 
pulsive progress by which the people of America, against 
all the interests so often controhing, — the mercantile 
interest, the church interest, the political interest^ the 
prayer of peace, — marched forward from year to year 
to the music of Liberty. They looked straight into the 
eye of Destiny, and saw that the time must surely come 
when the free tongue of the ballot would be> touched 
w^ith a live coal from the altar of the American heart ; 
and, though over a devastated land, would at length 
thunder to the world the law of Freedom and Humanity. 

They knew that Humanity's eyes are in its forehead, 
not in its occiput ; that revolutions go not backward. 

The South was right, entirely right, in seeing that 
the election of Lincoln was the signing of the death- 
warrant of Slavery in the Union. It is of no use smooth- 
ing matters to the patient who feels the hectic spot 



38 THE REJECTED STONE. 

burning on his cheek. No doubt, this first Republican 
Administration would have been more tender with 
Slavery than others : so do we humor and indulge, to 
the top of their bent, those whose graves are near. 

But on the day when the nation decided for the princi- 
'ple^ that Slavery had a right to he treated only as local 
property^ and then loith no more favor than other pro- 
2oerty, it touched the seat of life. 

Slave property does not rest on the same basis with 
other property ; and, under the same treatment, must 
inevitably pass away. 

Its recovery, when astray, cannot be trusted to the 
laws and courts by which recovery of other property is 
easy. 

It is not natural property, but the creature of enact- 
ment : consequently it cannot live on indifference. A 
mother cannot leave the child born without arms to 
make what way it can along with those who have two. 
Slavery has grown strong by being the darling of the 
Government : it can now live by nothing less. 

Our leaders cannot yet bring themselves to treat 
slave-owners with no more consideration than cow- 
owners or house-owners. Would a general offer his 
army to recover a flock of sheep which had taken to 
their heels, affrighted by his advancing army ? Would 
a commander turn aside from an invasion to crush out 
with an iron hand the army-worm, if it were devastating 
the wheat of a field by which he was passing ? Would 
any " Order No. 3 " be issued to repel a thousand fugi- 



COMPROMISE. 39 

tive horses which should escape from a rebel regiraent, 
and approach our lines ? 

Where confiscation must touch the slaves of armed 
rebelsj — more perilous, as they are' to us, than thrice 
their value in other forms of property, — Congress halts, 
hesitates, mixes, then, holding its nose, swallows. This 
overweening tenderness is the meat on which this our 
Caesar has fed that he hath grown so great. Mr. Breck- 
enridge truly called it a bill for the abolition of Slavery. 
Now, wdierever our flag makes its way, liberty to every 
slave musi go with it. This is theory, however : actual 
emancipation comes later. '^ He found thereon nothing 
but leaves ; for the time of figs was not yet." 

In the present conflict. Slavery has been more candid 
than we could have claimed. It has not, with the 
Northern traitors, based its secession upon personal- 
liberty bills. In some regions, it has acknowledged the 
Fugitive-slave Law to be unconstitutional : but every- 
where it has not failed to perceive that any State bill 
must be considered constitutional, unless the appointed 
court declares it otherwise ; and has craved no such 
decision, even with a court suited to its purposes. It 
has not based its movement on any abridgment of ter- 
ritorial rights. It has frankly acknowledged, that its 
very existence is incompatible with the existence of 
free government and popular suffrage. The ballot-box 
is its coffin. It demands girdling this year : it may de- 
mand hewing down the next. It certainly will. 

In what attitude does all this place the North ? 



40 THE REJECTED STONE. 

A mother fled from Moscow in a sledge drawn by an 
Arab steed. At her breast, folded warm from the cold 
of the bitter night, she held her babe. Then came the 
wolf upon her track, with its terrible howl. Fast and 
faster sped the sledge over the frozen snow ; but the 
hungry wolf gained on her. Piece by piece, she cast 
behind all the provision she had : the wolf devoured 
each, but, with hunger only whetted, rushed onward 
after the mother and her child. And now, when it was 
close upon her, she unwrapped the babe that nestled so 
near her heart, and cast it to the wolf. 

Unnatural mother ! would it not have been better, 
than thus to have purchased for thyself a life of shame, 
to have turned thyself to grapple with the wolf, and 
committed thy babe to the Arab steed and to God? 

'Tis but a picture of America, with hungry Slavery 
howling after her. Swift and relentless, it has pursued 
her. To it she has cast territory after territory : to 
it she has cast her treasures, and much of her best 
blood. She has seized from weaker nations around her 
that with which she thought to satiate the monster : 
she has seized the panting fugitive, there with halo of 
divinity about him, and torn him from the horns of God's 
altar, to cast to the wolf. Insatiable, it presses nearer, 
and prepares for the final leap. 

And now the question is, Shall America cast to the 
wolf her own sacred child, — Liberty ? 

No! 

my brothers ! a thousand times, Xo ! Let the mo- 



COxMPROMISE. 41 

ther, let America, turn to cope with Slavery, though 
she be torn asunder ; but let the holy child Liberty, 
over all, be saved ! 

This, then, being the moral situation of the two 
parties, each knowing the very existence of the other 
to be its own destruction, the very field of compromise 
is the field of battle. 

Freedom and Slavery have been hugging each other 
so hard, that it has grown to a death-hug. 

"We need not fear negotiation too much : in this stage 
of the conflict, any compromise will be only a flag of 
truce. Some timid officials, wishing to get out of the 
region of " villanous saltpetre," may send out such a 
flag, and gain an armistice for a few months or years ; 
but the end cannot come until Slavery or Liberty lies 
slain. 

It is written, '^ Righteousness and Peace have kissed 
each other.'' Sixty centuries of experience have added, 
^' Unrighteousness and War are forever linked together." 

Can any compromiser promise us, as the result of his 
plan, any thing else than the old " irrepressible conflict " ? 
You must cut the heart out of every thinker and 
reformer in America ere you get any thing else ; and 
resistance is the multiplication-table of Eeform. 

Is this, then, as some affirm, the swelling of a flood 
that shall presently subside again? 

A traveller came to a river ; and, being unable to ford 

4* 



42 THE REJECTED STONE. 

it, lie sat down on its banks, saying, " I will wait until 
the river has flowed by." He waited long ; he built 
him a house there ; and when the traveller's bones were 
traces of white lime, and the house marked only by the 
luxuriance of Aveeds on its site, the river was still flow- 
ing by. 

Let America scorn to adjourn for her children in the 
future the task now assigned her : she is too old in 
sorrow already not to know that a postponement is all 
she can effect, even if the Kind Hand has not removed 
that temptation. " The cup that my Father hath given 
me to drink, shall I not drink it ? " Not to be evaded, 
nor dashed aside, nor spilled, was it given. 

Hail, hail to thee, Messiah of nations, — thou who com- 
est from Edom with thy garments dyed red ! With 
thee go the blessings, for thee rise the prayers, of noble 
hearts all over the world, as thou goest forth steadfastly 
to tread the wine-press prepared by Destiny for thy 
feet, knowing not the wine that shall come, only that it 
shall make glad the heart of man. my Country ! there 
is a path that leads from Gethsemane, Garden of Agony, 
up to the snow-pure summit of Tabor, Mount of Trans- 
figuration. There shall thy nobler children rear for 
thee the tabernacles of the Past, the Present, and the 
Future. 



BROKEN. 43 



IX. 



BROKEN. 

In an old law-book — older than the Constitution, or 
the Missouri Compromise, or the Omnibus Bill — it is 
written of the Rejected Stone, ^'WJiosoever shall fall on 
this stone shall he bivken ; hut, on wJiomsoever it shall fall, 
it will grind him to poiode7\^^ 

Against the strong arm of this Universe hold out as 
we may, at length to its behest we must be broken. 
The Phoenician replies to the lightning with arrows : at 
last, men return their arrows to the quiver, and lift the 
lightning-rod for protection. Canute lashes the advan- 
cing tide : at last, men note the high-water mark, and 
build far enough beyond it. So we yield in the end. 

Broken ! 'Tis no threat ; 'tis no violence. The 
shuck of the wheat is broken under the flail, that the 
grain may be separated ; the grain itself is broken, that 
bread may be kneaded. Even so it is with nations : 
under the flails of God, they, too, must lie ; upon his 
mill-stone, for ever revolving, they must be broken. 

" Though the mills of God grind slowly, 
Yet they grind exceeding small." 

In the pride of our progress, in the ruddy strength of 
our youth, we lost the one thread that links the present 
to the past : we neglected the ever-accumulating tradi- 
tion, that Justice alone can really exalt a nation ; that 



44 THE REJECTED STONE. 

Justice, being overturned, will overturn. A few years 
ago, our leading statesman announced that there was a 
higher law than any human code. An angry echo from 
every point of our national compass growled back upon 
him ; the majority of the nation defied the supreme 
right, until he who brought the tables of that higher 
law was compelled to break them. Our fathers, kneel- 
ing with reverence before the sublime fact, still fresh in 
the wonder of nations, that a handful of men had been 
able to repel the strongest of nations, simply by the 
power of rectitude in their cause to engender super- 
human strength, had recognized the law higher than 
that which they framed, and left open the door of 
amendment whereby new revelations might enter. But 
our nation declared for nullification of the laws of God. 
It declared for injustice. It announced that the black 
man had no right that the white man was bound to 
respect. It enacted that ever}^ American, Avhen called 
on by an arch slave-hound, should at once get down on 
all-fours, and become a slave-hound. It went on from 
whorl to whorl of corruption ; it drew near to the bottom- 
less pit ; when suddenly the Great Hand rescued it from 
the nearly completed death, and cast it upon a glorious 
Revolution to be broken. 

Did we think to gain any thing by consenting to sell 
our brother to the Egyptian, heeding not his cries and 
tears ? Lo ! a mighty famine is in the land, and the 
lost Joseph is seen clothed with the power of locking 
up all the produce and wealth of the country. 



BROKEN. 45 

Begin on the lowest plane^ — for some are oxen, and 
must be led by hay, — and jDonder well the "broken*' 
fortunes of this country, resulting from its proud con- 
ceit that it could outwit the equity of the Universe. 
A pre-JEsopian fable relates that there was a fox Avho 
espied a garden of luscious grapes. To this garden, 
however, he could find but one opening ; and that Avas 
too small to admit his somewhat portly dimensions. 
The grapes were very tempting : what could Reynard 
do ? He hit upon a plan : he would fast until he 
became lean enough to get through the hole to the 
garden. Each day lie tried, and on the third day found 
himself sufficiently reduced to enter. Judge how the 
hungry, half-starved rogue enjoyed those delicious 
grapes. But, hark ! there is the sound of a farmer's 
voice : surely that was the distant bay of a dog ! 
Master Fox finds that his plan is not altogether safe : 
the close fence was built to exclude foxes. He hastens 
to the hole ; but, alas ! he finds that the hole which was 
large enough to admit a fox that had been fasting three 
days is too small for a fox full to the mouth of grapes. 
What can he do? Another ominous bay of the distant 
hound decides him : he must needs fast three days 
more ; and then, just as the gardener and his dog 
entered, he managed to escape, just as lean a fox as he 
teas ivhen he reached the delicious grapes. 

Thus it was that the Northern fox entered the 
Southern cotton-field. On what a low diet he must 
put himself ! " We have some j)rejudices against the 



46 THE REJECTED STONE. 

buying and selling of men, which don't go easily into 
a plantation.'' Mr. Webster replies, " You must con- 
quer your ]Drejudices." Good heavens ! Avho would 
have thought that men could starve out to such an 
extent the love of justice, the conscience, the manhood 
which they had inherited ! Yet the State would not 
make the hole bigger, and the Church did not tempt 
them with any other viands to abstain ; and at length 
the North was morally reduced enough to get on its 
knees, and creep into the small aperture to King Cot- 
ton's dominions. Speedily the Yankee fattened on the 
grapes; great flakes of Wall Street stuck out on his 
sides; State -street layers puffed out his eyes, so that 
he could scarcely see ! 

But the day of danger looms up. When Master Fox 
gave up soul and heart to get amongst these South- 
ern grapes, he did not mean to give up himself; but 
here Slavery is dogging him also. We need not pur- 
sue further the history of the humiliating necessity 
which we are now undergoing: the North is now dis- 
gorging all that it gained by years of shameful compli- 
ance with the evil of the South and the crime of the 
nation; and it must continue to pay down dollar on 
dollar until it reaches some new Plymouth Rock, as 
lean as if it had never seen the garden of the South, 
but rich, let us trust, in the experience that will never 
again let the seeds of the ^' Mayflower " wither as they 
spring up, because they have no depth of earth. 

The Devil seemed to be the shrewdest of Yankees : 



THE PRIVATEER. 47 

now tlie old proverb is remembered, The DeviVs an 
ass. 

'^ Thou hast conquered, Galilean ! " said dying 
Julian the Apostate. The North may, and will, now 
collect the bones of her great-browed children who 
yielded because she said " Yield ; " the fallen pillars of 
her crumbled church ; her children whose wounds yet 
smoke fresh from the stab of Slavery ; — and, broken 
now upon the stone she so long refused, shall write 
as their epitaph, — 

Vicist I, Humanitas ! 



X. 

THE PRIVATEER. 

A CRY comes up to the ear of America, — a long, 
piercing cry of amazement and indignation, — recog- 
nizable as one which can come only when the pro- 
foundest emotions of the human pocket are stirred. 
The privateers are at large ! They have taken away 
my coffee, and I know not where they have laid it. 
They have taken my India goods with swords and 
staves. For my first-class ship they have cast lots. 

"Was such depravity ever known before? So long 
as it was a human soul, launched by God on the eternal 
sea, that they despoiled ; so long as it was only a few 
million bales of humanity captured ; so long as it was 



48 THE REJECTED STONE. 

but the scuttling of the hearts of mothers and ftithers 
and husbands and wives, — we remained patient and 
resigned ; did we not ? But coffee and sugar ! — good 
God ! what is that blockade about ? To seize a poor 
innocent sloop ! — has Slavery no bowels ? And its 
helpless family of molasses-barrels ! — can hearts be 
so void of pity? Slavery must end. The spirit of 
the age demands it. The blood of a dozen captured 
freights crieth to Heaven in silveriest accents against 
it. 

Brothers, there is a laughter that opens into the 
fountain of tears. 

Can you tell me, you ship-owners and rich merchants, 
for how many cycles the coffee-berries ripened and fell 
ere came that marvel, a human hand, to gather them 
for you ? Will you ponder the stretch of the ages when 
fields of sugar-cane rotted to bring on new growths, 
and these to bring on others, to prepare merely the sod 
worthy to support the foot-sole of the man whom you 
have seen nailed up, body and mind, in your sugar- 
hogshead, without complaint, so long as the sugar came 
safely to hand? Have you not confused things a little, 
imagining that in nature the dusky man was for loam, 
and that the culminating glory and flower of the uni- 
verse is Cotton? How else shall we interpret your 
years of silence and calmness when only men and 
women were in the hands of the privateer, and your 
outcry when old metals and juices and vegetables are 
imperilled ? 



THE PRIVATEER. 49 

Yet^ too thankful that even thus the heart of trade 
is moved, one who, tlirough many weary years, has 
v/atched the torches kindled at the Light of lights 
flickering their lives away in the dark caverns under- 
neath Trade's gay saloons, cannot repress delight at the 
gay privateer. God speed thee, rakish ^' Sumter;*' and 
thee, swift-pouncer ^^ Nashville " ! May Heaven's blith- 
est breezes fill your sails, until your arrows of conviction 
have penetrated every unconvinced heart I We have 
got our Scripture interpretations fearfully confused : 
you peppery missionaries will shed brilliant exegetical 
light over the land. We shall have revised views from 
President Lord on the curse of Canaan ; and anti-piratic 
commentaries on the case of Onesimus, from Nehemiah. 
Our ethnology has become somewhat foggy : your ar- 
guments will be stronger than the now fashionable ones 
of Xott and Gliddon. We may discover a link in the 
races lower than the Negro, without travelling with Du 
Chaillu. God speed thee, brave privateer ! 

So long as African Slavery runs the blockade of 
the parties and churches of America, so long may the 
privateer run the blockade of the Southern coast with 
safetv ! 



50 THE KEJECTED STONE. 

XI. 

A FOREIGN POWER. 

The i^romptness with which, the Secretary of State 
has expressed the position of our Government on our 
transatlantic relations has elicited the warmest com- 
mendations of the people. It has been distinctly 
announced, that in this contest we will submit to no 
interference and accept no help from foreign powers. 

Especially none from the Powers Above ! 

Toward the last foreign Powers the cold shoulder 
has been turned in a way to rejoice the hearts of the 
^^ New- York Herald " and the " Boston Courier/' and 
many others, who have long insisted on the strict appli- 
cation of the Monroe doctrine to the government of 
God, whose aims at encroachment on this continent 
they have watched with such a jealous eye. 

Yet it is less than doubtful if we can conquer with- 
out them, or irrespective of an alliance w^ith them. 

Except as the two are symbols of other facts, we 
suppose that humanity at large is entirely indifferent 
whether the individual residing in the White House for 
the next four years is named J. Davis or A. Lincoln. 
If these two represent inferior and superior principles, 
— so that, as one or the other rules there, the shadow 
moves forward or backward, marking progression or 
retrogression on the dial of civilization, — then the 



A FOREIGN POWER. 51 

world is pledged to the suioerior. But suppose that to 
England, for instance, there are jDresented simply two 
jarring political — purely political — interests, in the 
names of the two Presidents j one representing the in- 
tegrity of the boundary-line of a rival nation, the 
other the independence of a nation not her rival, and 
on which she is dependent for cotton. The govern- 
ment, obeying its first instinct, self-preservation, as our 
own does, stands perfectly justified in taking sides 
with that party in which her interest is most involved. 
England has herself set up the standard of emancipa- 
tion, and to that her people Avould hold her ; but Avhere 
that principle is not only not involved, but distinctly 
disclaimed, the people Avill leave the government to the 
normal influences of the cotton-mill. They do perfect- 
ly right. The antislavery men of Europe have little 
reason to choose between governments supported by 
Caleb Gushing, B. F. Butler, and the ^' New -York 
Herald," on the one hand, and Yancey, Rhett, and Jeff. 
Davis, on the other. It is brought before Europe as a 
purely political question; and we cannot, Avithout a 
contemptible conceit, expect any element to determine 
the attitude of Europe toward it higher than policy. 
Is not popular government involved? Assuredly: but 
Europe has decided already that popular government 
is not good ; equally it has decided that cotton is 
good. 

Now let us trace this same principle as it decides our 
relation to the transmundane Power. 



52 THE REJECTED STONE. 

Our Congress requested the President to appoint a 
day of humiliation, flisting, and prayer ; and he did so : 
which shows that we have rather more disposition to 
conciliate this than any other foreign power. This was 
doubtless due to a late defeat. One is reminded of 
the psalm our fathers sang : — 

" Jeshurun he waxed fat, 

And down his cheeks they hung: 
He kicked against the Lord his God, 
And high his heels he flung." 

Jeshurun was reduced. We also have been reduced, 
certainly in a military, and w^e trust in a moral sense. 
When any fruits of this repentance are brought forth, 
we shall be glad to record the indications. Thus far, we 
stand fighting for as purely a selfish end as the rebels 
of the South. 

No doubt there are thousands of men North, and 
with our army in the South, who plead and fight for 
justice and freedom, not only for the electors of Mr. 
Lincoln, but also for men of every color. These main- 
tain the Government, because they hope, that, in its 
contest with the slaveholder, the slave will be freed. 
But should the star-spangled banner ever float on the 
shores of the Gulf, and still over African slaves, the 
hearts of thousands would once again freeze toward 
this nation, and the flag of Disunion float in the North, 
with thousands around it where hundreds were be- 
fore. 

Our President and his Premier have given us our 



A FOREIGN POWER. 53 

watchword : they have told its, that between Slavery 
and Freedom there is an " irrepressible conflict." If 
the Union with Slavery in it is regained, all will know 
that it is but the lull of the volcano. 

Thomas Jeiferson once said, that, if the South were 
ever to witness an insurrection of slaves, there was no 
attribute of God which could take the side of the 
oppressor in that contest. The leading commanders of 
this war against an insurrection initiated their entrance 
into the regions of Slavery by a promise of crushing 
out with an iron hand the insurrection of slaves : in 
other words, should these Negroes take side with our 
men in a struggle of life and death, they would be shot 
down for helping us ! Nearly every general proclaims 
that no fugitive shall enter his lines. Our President, 
in the midst of a slaveholders' insurrection, and on 
the blessed Fourth of July itself, sends a message 
to Congress, in which Slavery is not remotely al- 
luded to. 

Not long ago, a distinguished friend of the Republic 
of Haiti, in company with a very able and learned 
Senator, entered the office of a very wise and diploma- 
tic Secretary of one of the departments of this Govern- 
ment : whereupon a scene like this occurred : — 

Senator. Mr. Secretary, permit me to introduce you 
to Mr. A. B., a friend of the Haitian Government, and 
authorized to represent the same to a certain extent. 

Secretary. How do you do, Mr. A. B. ? 

A. B. Quite well; I thank you. 

6* 



54 THE REJECTED STONE. 

Senator. The Haitian Government now naturally 
hopes that the success of Republicanism secures the 
recognition of her republic. 

A. B. She is ready to send her minister at any 
time. 

Secretary (twisting uneasily in Ms seaf). Really, 
gentlemen, this is a very grave and difficult question ; 
and I have not leisure to consider it. 

Senator. A difficult question ? 'Tis but a scratch 
of your pen. 

Secretary {tivisting three times in his seat). But, sir, 
— really, sir, — I — I — • 

A. B. Oh ! do not let us press it, if the Government 
is averse to it. 

Secretary. The fact is, gentlemen, Washington can- 
not receive a black minister. 

[Exeunt Senator and A. B. with '^ Goodrinornings.''^) 

The Republican Administration had answered Repub- 
lican Haiti in the very words of Henry A. Wise, when, 
a nation freed by her own right arm, she vainly ap- 
pealed to America for recognition, as America had a 
few years before, and under the same circumstances, 
appealed to other nations. 

The intrenchments about Washington may be very 
complete ; but mark this : Washington is not safe until 
a hlach minister can he received there ! 

Now, whilst we are speculating as to the i^ossibility 
of our blockade being raised by France and England, 
would it not be well for us to see if we have not 



A FOREIGN POWER. 55 

weakened our cause and our force by completely dis- 
owning the only moral element in this conflict? 

We have made, or are in danger of making, four 
millions of disappointed enemies in the South, whom 
we might have counted on as our friends in any emer- 
gency. Freedom is first with the black, as Avith every 
man : next to that, the evil he knows, against that he 
knows not. Every Negro returned to his master — to 
be made an example of what treacherous Negroes may 
expect in these times — has sown amongst his com- 
rades the seeds of hate and revenge against our 
army. 

We have disheartened many of our noblest and best 
young men, by degrading, with a taint of man-hunting 
and oppression, the banner and the cause. 

We have paralyzed the pulses of the lovers of equal- 
ity and liberty all over the world, which were ready 
to beat toward us with a steady tide of sympathy and 
encouragement. How could Victor Hugo or Garibaldi 
extend his hands to a general, who, with the very 
weapon with which he is defending his own liberty, is 
ready to crush others who would seek theirs ? 

We have lost the battle of Manasses, and with it 
the prestige of a first victory and the order of an 
army, chiefly because General McDowell's colorphobia 
must cut off the Negro's hope, and with it his own 
only source of information. It was a crime and a 
blunder. 

In refusing to recognize Haiti, we have shrouded the 



56 THE REJECTED STONE. 

one light that might now be shining over the darkest 
problem of this war. 

Would it not be a curious case of poetic justice, if, 
in a year from now, we should witness a ^^ situation" 
somewhat like the following? — 

1. The United States calling on the slaves of the 
South, to whose bondage she has so long been a 
party, whose possible freedom by confiscation she re- 
luctantly approved, to save her entire people from 
subjugation. 

2. The United States begging Haiti to help her sus- 
tain and shield millions of manumitted women and 
children, and invoking a black minister at Wash- 
ington. 

The army of the United States is, without doubt, 
fighting for the liberty of the slave ; but so also is the 
army of the Confederate States. Both are, by compul- 
sion, hastening the day of freedom (but that is scarcely 
more our object than it is theirs). Indeed, the Southern 
army has done more of this indirect service to human- 
ity than our own. With both it has been involuntary. 
There is a Power behind both thrones at work. Free- 
dom sits above, in calmness and light; and we know her 
fitar cannot recede below the horizon : but whether she 
is to be advanced the next step by a dreadful retribu- 
tion to the recreant North, or by the conquest of the 
South, is, alas ! yet doubtful. Again and again have 
strong governments, not built upon the head corner- 



A FOREIGN POWER. 57 

stone of Justice, been buried under tlie splendor of 
tlieir own ruins, that humanity at large might have 
another monument to say, " Remember ! " 

Were our cause sanctified by any universal principle, 
the arm of God, whose sinews are the true hearts of the 
whole world, would be folded about us. " But," it is 
replied, " we are fighting for the principle of free suf- 
frage: it is bullets arraigning ballots." Yet scarcely can 
free suffrage be called a principle. It is an institution 
yet on trial in the world : it has yet to make its cause 
good at the tribunal of Reason. Freedom of the ballot 
is not necessarily good in itself: if it result in perpetu- 
ating injustice or in anarchy, it proves itself a wrong 
principle. New- York City has had to ask the State 
Legislature to select her municipal officers. England 
may well point to her superior freedom under limited 
suffrage. Her members of Parliament are not assassi- 
nated ; her Queen does not have to pass from Scotland 
to London in disguise ; there is no county of her king- 
dom where her most radical orator is debarred an 
entrance on penalty of tar and feathers. All these evils 
have for years co-existed with our popular suffrage : and 
our Republican Administration loould hardly have mo- 
lested one of them, had the South not precipitated this 
Rebellion. 

Therefore we still maintain, that, as far as our Gov- 
ernment is concerned, — that is, saving a reserved 
purpose among the unofficial masses whose power is 
yet to be measured, — we have no aim in tliis con- 



58 THE REJECTED STONE. 

flict that makes onr cause the cause of Destiny, or 
our success any necessary step in the progression of 
the world. 



XII. 

M A N A 8 S E S. 

It is said that one of our army chaplains had pre- 
pared a discourse on the text, " Manasseh is mine.'' 
It was never preached. At daybreak his regiment was 
marching forward , with the hope of preaching the same 
text from the cannon's mouth. But the text has 
remained a vision in the Psalms. 

Manasses is a symbol. The assault and tha cou- 
rage of it, the repulse and the shame of it, symbolize 
with unerring accuracy a certain moral status of our 
nation, consequently of its army, which, by the condi- 
tions of the universe, did not deserve Manasses, and did 
not obtain it. Why were we defeated there ? We had 
poor generals. Why had we poor generals ? Why was 
Patterson enabled by his cowardice or treachery to 
make our disaster sure, after McDowell, by blunderingly 
marching in the dark, had made it probable ? Both of 
these men were known as life-long cringers to the men 
they were sent to fight. If John Brown had been with 
a United-States army at Harper's Ferry, would he have 



MANASSES. 59 

been animated with what seems to have been Patter- 
son's one aim, — to return his young volunteers safe to 
their parents unharmed ? Not so did John Brown return 
his own sons. If Montgomery of Kansas had been at 
Fairfax, would he have scorned the only medium of 
intelligence and real help, — the fugitive Negro ? 

Why were these men, who had proved themselves 
moral cowards, set to control the forces of Liberty ? 
The Administration took them because the country was 
not up to furnishing, or standing by, better men. The 
men who would unweariedly, sleeplessly, with the fire- 
heart of Peter the Hermit and the iron nerve of 
Cromwell, have pressed upon and taken Manasses on 
that Sunday, were men whose appointment would have 
returned on the Administration a storm of indignation. 
The country would have been divided, and perhaps 
surrendered. 

Had the country been up to a victory at Manasses, 
it w^ould have been previously up to having Charles 
Sumner for President. 

But let us search a little further. We have seen that 
we were outgeneralled because we had half-hearted 
men to lead our forces. Our soldiers fought bravely, 
earnestly, and had almost won the day. Why that 
panic ? The intrenchments of the enemy were perfect : 
our soldiers conquered one battery, only to find them- 
selves at the mercy of two covering it. It had been 
impossible that Panic could have stormed our army, if 
Despair had not first weakened it. Our army fought 



GO THE REJECTED STONE. 

long after every soldier was convinced that tliey would 
never occupy Manasses that day. 

There were long months^ when, it is known, there 
were few if any batteries or forces at Manasses.- Only 
give me time enough, and I will make any hen-coop 
impregnable to all the artillery now on this continent. 
The entire defences of that pass were reared by a most 
culpable fault on the part of our military and civic 
leaders, who will stand on the page of History which 
records that day, as parties to a base deception of the 
American people. It is now evident that they began 
this contest on a theory radically different from that 
Avhich the people had determined was the only one 
consistent with their national honor. The people were 
willing to trust them with the method, so long as it was 
understood that the object to be reached was assigned 
by them exclusively. Deliberately and absolutely, the 
people had decided that there should be no new gua- 
ranties to Slavery ; that there should be no compromise, 
however infinitesimal ; that this issue should fairly and 
squarely be an acceptance of the gauntlet thrown at 
their feet by the South. Yet there succeeded the 
uprising of the people a delay, which, under their very 
eyes, was improved by the enemy to make Virginia one 
large masked battery. 

There is no question of military tactics and stratagem 
here, — only a question of common sense and honesty. 
The men who repulsed drilled regulars at Concord 
Bridge did not wait for large arrays, fine uniforms, and 



MAXASSES. 61 

months of drill. Nay, determination and rapidity had 
already done for us in Missouri what slowness and Har- 
dee have undone for us at Washington ; and would have 
so continued, had not Washington stretched its red tape 
into Missouri. These men at the South Avere even 
more undisciplined than ours. We should have been, so 
far, equal. They were our superiors in one thing alone : 
they had stolen the means of putting a battery on every 
square acre of their frontier. To fight at once, we 
were stronger in numbers, and as well drilled : to delay 
until they were fortified was to make us inferior ; the 
axiom being, that one man behind the trenches equals 
four outside. The Secessionists of Maryland and Mis- 
souri have publicly declared, ^' We were conquered only 
by being surprised." Virginia might have been to-day 
joining in the same confession. 

Meanwhile, about all this unfathomable strategy at 
Washington, — which reminds one of Dr. Cudworth, 
who, in his contest with the atheists, stated their argu- 
ment so strongly that he couldn't answer it himself, — 
there were indications that this delay was more for 
diplomatic than for military reasons. No traitor was 
treated as if we were at war. Mr. Breckenridge, in his 
seat in the Senate, taunted the Government that it had 
not dared to treat seized rebels as by nations they are 
treated. The people saw their own soldiers severely 
and ignominiously punished for offences in the camp, — 
offences half induced by the demoralization of the delay, 

6 



62 THE REJECTED STONE. 

— whilst spies and assassins were released on their 
already perjured parole. 

It became probable to large numbers in this country, 
who naturally hesitated to express their suspicion, that 
TWO MEN at Washington — the one in the military, the 
other in the civic department, each a possible President 
and hitherto associated with that office — were running 
a race, each hoping to loom up before a re-united coun- 
try as A GREAT PACIFICATOR. 

Equally were these people convinced that their Presi- 
dent was entirely trustworthy, and that no such base 
pacification could be carried on without his being de- 
ceived with the rest of the people. 

The suspicion increased when it came out that Mr. 
Seward had held correspondence with Judge Campbell, 
and that a quasi armistice had been made at Pickens, of 
which our President was "imperfectly informed." 

The suspicion spread like a contagion that we were 
deceived. The Government gave no response ; no act 
was done, no traitor hung, to show that the Government 
meant what the people meant ; until at last, the misgiv- 
ing of our earnest masses becoming intolerable, they 
uttered their whole heart in that noble war-cry, " For- 
ward TO Richmond ! " 

The " Tribune," which was the tongue worthy to 
utter it, did indeed bow to the storm which ahvays 
meets the Cassandras who utter too soon what all see 
presently : but it will one day claim that watchword as 
the dearest laurel among the many it has nobly earned 



MANASSES. 63 

in this conflict ; and the people will one day remember 
those who told them the truth at risk of their own dis- 
pleasure, and as long as they could hear it 

It was not its fault, nor that of the people for whom 
it spoke, that stupid or selfish men, and deceivers of the 
nation, perverted those words into " Forward to Rich- 
mond half harnessed ! Forward Avhilst your regiments 
are in camps all over the North ! Forward on empty 
stomachs ! Be sure you take but one man to their 
three ! Be sure you depend for re-enforcement on a 
man whom the mob of Philadelphia had to force into 
showing his colors ! " 

No loyal heart in America should have failed to recog- 
nize the plain and ominous tones concentred in that 
Avar-cry. It meant, — and many a tricky, trembling 
diplomat in Washington knew that it meant, — ^' We, 
the people of America, are determined for once that we 
will not be deceived. We do not deplore, but Avelcome, 
the storms that are now to sweep away the refuges of 
lies which politicians have been building out of the 
rights and honor of the nation. Gentlemen at Wash- 
ington, civic and military, Ave have arisen in our might. 
Each family has with tears of agony, but no less eagerly, 
laid on the altar its first and fairest fruits. We have, 
rather than offer a compromise of right and honor, 
surrendered wealth ; nay, some of us, the bread on our 
tables. We have slioAvn you that we are in earnest. 
We have yet to see one fact at our Capitol indicating that 
you are in earnest as we are. These men you release 



64 THE EEJECTED STONE. 

on parole we regard as the murderers of our country. 
These men you write billets to we regard as the would- 
be assassins of our husbands, brothers, fathers, and 
sons. We will not be cheated. We distrust your moral 
position toward this Rebellion. No defeat that can befall 
us on our way to Richmond can be so bad as being de- 
feated by some patchwork of compromise in our purpose 
of settling this issue with the South once and for ever. 
We demand, then, that by some decisive blow, even if 
it recoil upon us, we shall be utterly committed to this 
war. We demand that the chasm shall be made so com- 
plete, that the most abject trifler, who desires to bridge 
it with a compromise, shall see that his effort would 
only sink him in the abyss. Therefore, forward to 
Richmond ! " 

All this was in that war-cry, which is to be uttered 
yet again, and, though with the united voice of the 
country, with no more nobility than it possessed at first. 

When General Scott heard of the defeat at Manasses, 
he, with great excitement, said that the President should 
depose him as a coward, because he yielded to this popu- 
lar pressure. General Scott is not physically a coward. 
Is he a moral coward ? Shall we take him at his word ? 
History records, that a great commander wrote after a 
defeat, ^^ I have lost a great battle, and entirely by my 
own fault." In saying this, he gained a greater victory 
than he lost. Had as sincere and great a spirit com- 
manded at Washington, we believe the country would 
have received some such message as this : — 



MANASSES. 65 

" To THE People of the United States. 

" We, some of your official leaders, have lost you a 
great battle by our own fault, as far as that fault can be 
traced to any individuals ; which arises from the gene- 
ral corruption of the Government through the malaria 
of Slavery. When you and your President decided to 
fight for this Government, we, your public servants, 
tacitly meant to pacificate and compromise. Acting 
under this purpose, we gave to you, as a reason for de- 
lay, a military pretext. We had no doubt that the South 
would compromise. They secretly encouraged us to 
think so ; until, when it was too late to remedy our mis- 
take, they showed that their desire for peace was a feint 
to get time for fortification. When we came to see for 
the first time definitely that the question must be set- 
tled by arms, the nation was already demanding that our 
delay should end. It was natural that they should so 
demand. But our first deception could, unless openly 
confessed, lead only to the defeat of our forces. We 
could not muster courage to acknowledge the result of 
our folly, — to say, ' The advance which was feasible 
two months ago, has, by our delay for negotiation, been 
rendered impossible. Our honest reply to your ^' For- 
ivard to Bichmond r^ is, that it cannot be done for six 
months or more, without too much cost; and to advance 
now would be to wash out a political deception in the 
blood of brave men.' We had not the moral courage 
to say it : the fatal result came.'^ 



66 THE REJECTED STONE. 

The People reply : — 

'^ Whether the people decide that you gentlemen 
who hold power under this administration are the right 
men in the right place, or the opposite, they cannot 
allow the blame to fall on you for a default which is 
much more their own. They remember that a wise 
man affirmed, ' The people are always correctly repre- 
sented.' Their leaders, military and civic, had every 
reason to suppose that a people, who have for so many 
years submitted to having their honor bought and sold 
by their representatives, had still their price. Though 
now, ' a nation born in a day,' they abhor their former 
stupidity and insensibility toward Human Rights, no 
less than their ovv^n self-respect, yet they cannot rea- 
sonably complain that these newly unsealed fountains 
have not, as yet, cleansed the Augean stables of Wash- 
ington. Therefore we set up our memorial- pillar at 
Manasses, on it writing, ' Here outraged Humanity was 
avenged upon a nation, that, from the day of its own 
liberation, heard the scourges that fell, heard the cries 
of the stricken, and heeded not, but went on in igno- 
ble rest, until the very sword which guarded its own 
liberties had rusted in its scabbard.' Therefore we 
take to ourselves the reproach you have heaped on 
yourselves, to bear it with you ; and, if we call new 
leaders to your places, it is not for punishment, but it 
is another effort to make ourselves understood at Wash- 
ington. It must be there known that we, the people. 



BETH-EL. 67 

are in earnest ; that we are absolutely determined that 
this Rebellion shall be crushed, and that in no case shall 
one-half of this continent be given over to the domi- 
nion of Slavery and Barbarism; and that whosoever 
shall put himself in the way of this purpose shall be 
swept off as by a flood." 

Here let us end this sad chapter, — as painful to him 
who wrote it as to any who shall read it. 



XIII. 

B E T H - E L. 



This was the name that the patriarch gave to the 
place where he came a wanderer. There the sun went 
down, and he slept with a stone for his pillow. In that 
night, over that stony pillow, hovered the angels ; and 
in the morning " he took the stone that he had for a 
pillow, and set it up for a pillar." From his hard lot 
uprose his strength. 

Hard was the pillow given at Manasses, upon which 
America must rest her head. Is there no heavenward 
ladder stretching up from that grief? Can she not also 
take her stony pillow, and set it up for a pillar of future 
strength ? " Experience/' says Carlyle, " does charge 



68 THE REJECTED STONE. 

dreadfully high school-wages ; but she teaches as none 
other." To the same end, Burns's cheery verse : — 

" Though losses and crosses 
Be trials right severe, 
There's wit there, you'll find there, 
You'll get no other- where." 

The first and most important lesson inculcated at 
Manasses is, that God is not on the side of the strongest 
battalions. 

I know that Napoleon said He was ; but I also know, 
that, soon after he began to act on that principle, his 
Battalion-Providence took him to perish on a small rock 
off the coast of Africa. 

There was a time when Napoleon's battalions were 
arrayed on the side of God : his eye was filled with the 
coronation-day of Humanity, not of himself. Then, in- 
deed, he was the Man of Destiny; for Freedom marches 
to the drum-beat of Destiny. Then it was that Beetho- 
ven, lover of the people, wrote the ^' Symphony for a 
Hero." But soon one brought the old composer tidings 
of his idol, which caused him to leap from his seat, and 
tear the symphony, and cast it into the fire : then, with 
tears, he sat down and wrote the " Funeral March for a 
Hero," who, as a person, was still living : alas ! he 
lived no more for Man. The Eternal Thought he de- 
manded should shape itself to his battalions. So the 
halo of Napoleon faded to a diadem. 

There is nothing arbitrary or specially providential 
in all this. He lost his faith in the power of ideas, in 



BETH-EL. 69 

the tremendous power of enthusiasm for a high cause 5 
forgot that the sword that seemed to translate the light- 
ning, when striking for eternal Truth and Right, was 
but a piece of steel, or less, when carving a throne for 
a man, even though that man were Napoleon. Again 
and again, the lesson has been assigned us to learn. 
Xerxes, advancing upon Greece with his countless host, 
does not find that God is on the side of the strongest. 
The same testimony was borne at the baptismal blood- 
font of this nation, and the world called on to observe 
how three millions had successfully repelled for eight 
years the strongest nation on earth, and at last brought 
it to terms, simply because their cause bore with it the 
inspiration of Liberty. 

It seems that we needed Manasses to remind us of 
it once more. 

^' What ! was the cause of the rebels, and not that of 
our nation, the cause of Liberty?" 

Let us not fear to face the facts , most of all, this 
chief one : They were fghtmg for their liberty. True, 
it was their liberty ; the liberty of Wrong, the free 
course of Anarchy, the untrammelled rule of Passion, 
the uncurbed privilege of trampling the most sacred 
rights and hopes of mankind ; a liberty which the 
laws of this universe for evermore deny. Still, mark : 
this blow for animal liberty calls up tlie animal ferocity 
and strength, which can be mastered only by an equal 
passion and fortitude for the higher liberty. Fanati- 
cism is only second in strength to inspiration ; and we 



70 THE REJECTED STOXE. 

can conquer in this war, only when the love of Human- 
ity inspires us as fully as the love of Slavery inspires 
the South. Enthusiasm for bunting ; interest in a 
boundary -line j concern for the control of the Missis- 
sippi ; " institutions bequeathed by our fathers ; " " the 
glorious fabric of our Union/' — I warn you, my coun- 
trymen, that, at whatever Manasses these alone meet the 
arms that fight for the kingdom of Oppression, they 
will be swept away as by a blasting sirocco. 

Let us follow the approved maxim that bids us learn 
from our enemy, and sit at the rebel's feet a moment. 
See how he fights for Slavery ! See how pitiless he is 
to the enemy of Slavery ! Do you live in a Slave 
State : say one word against the institution, and see if 
the hearts that knew your childhood do not freeze to 
ice, and if the arms once twined about you will not be 
drawn to strike ! Over all the appeals of relationship 
and affection ; over all the claims of brain to think, or 
tongue to speak ; over wasted humanity, Saharas of 
ignorance, over the interests of property, — over all, 
the Slave-god sits amidst his devotees. He has his 
martyrs, as much as Bralim or Jehovah. The parallel 
drawn between the warfare of Sepoy and Southerner is 
not fanciful : all races fight so for their religions, and 
Slavery is the real and only religion of the South. To 
it other regions are evil in proportion to their freedom ; 
other Free States are diabolical, more or less ; Massa- 
chusetts is the Devil, because Antislavery is Anti- 
christ. 



BETH-EL. 71 

Our reporters have told to horror-stricken ears the 
cruel excesses which succeeded the battle of Manasses. 
A young man from the North, we are told, finding a 
rebel soldier in a swoon, proifered his canteen: the 
Southerner drank, and revived; then immediately shot 
his benefactor. The story is intrinsically credible. 
Returning from his swoon, his first thought was for his 
cause, and the blow for that cause which he was on that 
field to strike ! Supposing him even to have compre- 
hended all, — to have recognized his preserver in his 
country's enemy, to have felt the gratitude which any 
brute must feel, — yet what business has he to let gra- 
titude or any personal feeling come between him and 
his cause ? That benefactor may be the very man to 
send a ball through Jeff. Davis's heart ! He is not his 
own, else he could press that kindly hand : he is 
Slavery's ; and Slavery has whispered all other spirits 
out of him, and filled him with its own. Ah, if Free- 
dom but had champions so surcharged with her spirit ! 
If she but had great lovers to match such haters ! 

Slavery is a god, and has in the South gradually cre- 
ated his own new heavens and new earth. In the 
latter generations, he has moulded the very brains in 
their wombs to his own image and likeness, so that they 
reek with hot blood when any foe speaks in unbelief of 
their creator. He is dear to them as to the eye is the 
light of which it is the organism. 

Now, Northmen, with what do you confront this? 
Have you any Freedom-frenzy, with its superhuman 



72 THE REJECTED STONE. 

strength ? Do you worship Liberty with a passion such 
as the heart has for its blood ? Is Liberty an uncom- 
promisable principle to you, so that you count its foes 
the agents of the fiend upon earth ? Has Boston 
treated Mr. Yancey, when there pleading for Slavery, 
as honestly and faithfully as Charleston treated Mr. 
Hoar, when there to distantly hint Liberty? 

The other day, Mr. Speaker Grow, retiring tempo- 
rarily from the chair of the House, called to that seat 
Mr. Burnett of Kentucky, an avowed sympathizer with 
treason. Some one called attention to the contrast 
between the Republican and the Southern Speaker, 
Orr, who never called any one to the chair but one of 
his own party ; and evidently considered the contrast 
in Mr. Grow's fevor ! Trace the course of the two 
Speakers, and they will take you logically to the re- 
lative positions of the two armies on the evening of 
July 21 ; and until the country has got so far be- 
yond these sentimentalities as not only to condemn 
utterly even so slight a dapperness as that of Mr. 
Grow, but to render it as impossible for Burnett to sit 
in Congress as it would be for John M. Botts to be in 
the Richmond Congress, it will put its trust in chariots 
and horsemen in vain. We are not in earnest for Free- 
dom, as they are for Slavery : our battalions are not on 
the side of our God ; theirs are thoroughly and utterly 
on the side of their God. Therefore we stand mystified 
and irritated, — eighteen millions held at bay and re- 
pulsed by eight ! 



BETH-EL. 73 

At last, when it was too late, Napoleon had learned 
the deeper lesson ; and he said, '^ No people devoted to 
its government and institutions can be conquered." 
Devoted, observe ! It is the old word for victims bound 
on altars, and devoted to the gods ; and Napoleon saw 
that men could be thus sacredly devoted to tlieir free- 
dom, thus laid on the altar of their country ; and that, 
when they were so, something stronger than heavy 
artillery was at Avork. So, by his own authority, 
we must change the maxim, and read, " The strongest 
hattalions are those on the side of God.-^ 

Another lesson, and one following on this, is, that we 
must regard the forces in such a contest as this as more 
nearly equal than we are apt to assume. First, we 
must remember that a nation never attacks one of twice 
its population, unless in some way it has a full compen- 
sation for this discrepancy. In the present case, we 
know, that, when Sumter was attacked, the South was 
armed, the North unarmed : in the next place, the re- 
possession of its lost integrity and wrested property 
made it necessary for the United States to take the 
attitude of an invader, and the real disabilities of fight- 
ing on an unfamiliar soil. Under the circumstances, it 
would have required an army at Manasses of two hun- 
dred thousand men to have made us equal in physical 
force to the Southern army there. Secondly, we are to 
remember that the very discrepancy in numbers and 
wealth between belligerents, Avhilst it often begets a 
dangerous sense of security in the stronger party, inva- 

7 



74 THE REJECTED STONE. 

riably leads the weaker to the fullest tension of every 
nerve and sinew, and the levying on every resource, 
however unusual. From these considerations, we see 
the plain natural causes for the seeming paradoxes to 
Avhich attention has been called. We must more and 
more fix it in our minds, that size and power are by no 
means convertible terms or facts. A hornet is more 
than a match for a wolf Emerson's epigram reminds 

USj — 

" Foxes are so cunning 
Because they are not strong." 

In nature, weakness itself frequently becomes a source 
of strength : liability and danger make the eye quicker, 
the paw more velvety. Wild animals becomemore spite- 
ful and deadly as they are smaller : the inhabitants of 
the tropics dread the roar of the lion less than the scent 
of the vinegar-bug. Already we have seen the law 
thus suggested borne out at the South in the effort to 
poison our troops ; in the spying of important facts 
under flags of truce ; in their confinement of the war^ 
so far as they could, to the plan of the moccason, — 
picking off at night, ambuscade, masked battery, and 
the use of our own flag to protect themselves, and se- 
duce our men into their trap. 

When our army has fully learned its lessons, — moral 
and military, — the chaplain may preach on his text, 
" Manasseh is mine : '' it will be ours in a more impor- 
tant sense than if our flag waved over it to-day. 



A REBELLION r^. A REVOLUTION. 75 



XIV. 

A REBELLION vs. A REVOLUTION. 

There has been a general confusion in the minds of 
both parties as to their historical and moral position in 
this conflict. They of the South have claimed that they 
are revolutionists, and justify themselves under the 
right of revolution. Many of the North have accepted 
the terms ; justly reasoning, that the right of revolu- 
tion implies an interest, and possibly, as now, a duty 
pledged to prevent it. Revolution depends for its dig- 
nity and heroism purely upon the worth and justice of 
its cause ; for, as all would applaud a child's resistance 
to his father when that father demanded of it some dis- 
honorable act, so all would cry " Shame ! '' on the violent 
rebellion against a kind and good parent. Had our 
American Revolution been for the purpose of forming 
our Colonies into a band of robbers and pirates, no Pitt 
would have been found to plead our cause, no Lafayette 
to fight our battles. Revolution, in an unjust cause, is 
only an inauguration of bloodshed and assassination. 

Therefore it is wrongly called Revolution. Revolu- 
tion is a word nearly related to Evolution, and indicates 
the normal and healthy progression of the world on the 
prescribed orbit of civilization. Pangs it may have ; but 
they are the previous pangs of birth into life. It may 
wring tears ; but each tear falls in blessed light, and 



76 THE REJECTED STONE. 



t) 



ives some tint to the bow that haloes the world. Re- 
volution has marched on with the advancing world, and 
with it the fire of war and the cloud of sorrow ; but its 
fire and cloud have been 23illars leading on to Human- 
ity's Promised Lands. 

^ Those who have set themselves against these revolu- 
tions — the normal steps of human progression — have 
been always the Pharaohs, Hapsburgs, Philip the Se- 
conds, George the Thirds, and Bombas ; their use 
being always the negative one of making each advance 
more thorough by making it difficult and costly ; their 
destiny, always to fail, in the end, to suppress the new 
germ. So, if this were a revolution in the South, this 
nation would now, ere its own majority is reached, be 
standing in the position of the hard Pharaoh and the 
Egyptian taskmasters tow^ards the Israelitish bondmen, 
and actually in the same relation to the South that 
George the Third so lately held toward itself! 

The South claims that this is the true attitude in 
which the parties stand, and bids us prepare for the 
fate that has ever overtaken the obstinate oppressor. 

On the surface, and for the moment, the South is 
right in this. So long as the position of our Govern- 
ment is purely political, — so long as it remains, as 
now, a question of government against government, of 
authority against authority, — Ave are their obstinate 
George the Third ; and 07i that coimt we are already par- 
tially, and in the end shall be completely, nonsuited. 

But this defeat will be our real success ; for it will 



A REBELLION vs. A REVOLUTION. 77 

drive us from our present Tiiiteiiable fortress lo that 
which the ages have reared for us, and Avhose guns 
command the continent and the world. Right com- 
mands all trenches, even those of Liberty ; and to it 
is assigned the power of silencing the batteries that 
defend the liberty of Wrong, under whatever mask of 
Independence it may hide. Men fighting for their 
" altars " are strong ; but, if on those altars human 
victims lie bleeding, they are Aveaker than those loho 
come to rescue those victims. 

Behind the national army now in the field, there 
stands in the shadow another, silent and waiting. As 
yet, it is refused. Not until other defeats, and an ex- 
haustion of other re-enforcements, will these re-enforce- 
ments be called on. They can calmly wait; for they are 
not three-years men : they are eternity men. The 
South already sees them behind there, more terrible 
than an army with banners : they desire to settle the 
war before this second army takes the sword. For 
they know that really the revolution is on our side, 
and that as soon as the nation feels that, and acts 
upon it, the strength of the South is gone. In that 
moment they become the Pharaohs and taskmasters, 
and America the revolutionary Israel, bursting their 
fetters, scorning their flesh-pots, and going forth in the 
strength of Israel's God to inherit the land declared 
unto their fathers. 

We are the Revolutionists. It was the revolution 
of the American nation that made this war necessary. 

7* 



i» THE REJECTED STONE. 

The South stands relatively where it always stood^ and 
where the tyrant has stood since the world began. 
This is true, not in any fanciful or strained sense^ but 
in the simplest and most direct sense. Slavery has 
always ruled this country. As soon as a seat of power 
was reared, Slavery assumed it. Its rod was extended 
over the lot of the righteous, and they put forth their 
hands to iniquity. It ruled commerce ; it expunged the 
truth of history ; it brought its Index Expurgatorius 
on the page of school-book and prayer-book. Scholars 
wrote for it ; divines preached for it : it clasped the 
Bible with handcuffs, and festooned the Cross of Christ 
with chains. 

Its tyranny was over the North. In the South was 
its throne : the Southerners were its royal family. On 
the North was laid its rod of iron. Under it their great 
men bowed low, licking the dust from the tyrant's foot, 
and getting in return his imperial kick. Did a minister 
plead for Liberty ? Slavery commanded that he should 
be exiled from his pulpit, and his family live on a crust 
of bread. So it ordered, when Dudley Tyng " stood 
up for '' the Christ of to-day with the scourges on his 
back, and sent a South-Carolinian to take his place in 
a Northern pulpit, to plot against the nation whilst in 
that pulpit. Did any senator speak for Freedom ? He 
was avoided as a leper, or stricken down in his place. 
The North was made to plait the lashes for its own 
back, — to forge the chains for its own limbs : the men 
whom she furnished, and who were called Presidents 



A REBELLION vs. A REVOLUTION. 79 

and Representatives, were not Presidents nor Repre- 
sentatives, but minions and crawling courtiers, sitting 
under the footstool of Slavery. None could be trusted. 
Head after head even of the noblest was laid low, as if 
there were a dry-rot among men. The dog-star reigned 
and raged, and the best man could scarcely tell whether 
he would not be a slave-hound before night. We had 
no country. In proportion as we were real men, our 
country sank and hardened about us into a cold dun- 
geon, where we lay chilled and chained, with vermin 
creeping over us. 

Against this Tyrant, America at last inaugurated a 
revolution. Slowly and with many disparagements the 
feeble cause of Liberty prepared for a final struggle. 
Her pulses beat low ; her heart-throbs are faint : she is 
only not crushed because purblind Oppression imagines 
the life already, or nearly, ebbed out. But an old fire, 
that was in deep alliance with the central heats of the 
earth, and under which old Wrong had again and again 
shrivelled like a burnt scroll, yet lingered in her heart. 
Anon the flame leapt out at eye and tongue ; and 
despite the play of the engines, despite the cold-water 
jets sent from pulpit and press and society and office, 
the winds of heaven fanned that flame until the parties 
were consumed, the political elements melted with fer- 
vent heat, and Slavery compelled to begin the world 
over again, and rebuild its throne over those ashes if it 
could ! 

It was the noblest revolution the world ever saw that 



80 THE REJECTED STONE. 

placed Abraham Lincoln in the White House at Wash- 
ington ; the noblest, because the first ever known upon 
this planet where the legitimate weapons of Truth were 
alone used. These mighty strongholds yielded to the 
voices, the persuasions, the reasons, of earnest and just 
men : they Avere besieged with arrows of light, shelled 
with the bombs of Free School and Free Thought. 
^' Love is the hell-spark that burneth up the mountain 
of Iniquity," said Mohammed. So also have we found 
it. Besides those who truckled to Slavery with mean 
motives, there were many fond and simple souls, who 
could ^' think no evil," were it of the Devil; and these 
yielded to Slavery that vast extent of rope, wherewith, 
when attained, rogues do proverbially hang themselves. 
And thus the revolution, without the firing of a gun 
from the side of the revolutionists, had gone on, until 
the steps of Freedom were on the threshold of a 
liberated and redeemed Ne.w World. The dayspring 
from on high had already visited us : the banner which 
had fallen out of the sky to blazon itself only in the 
scars and stripes on the slave's back, or on some weaker 
nation beside us, once more floated up, and j)romised 
to symbolize, as of old, the streaks of Humanity's ad- 
vancing day. 

The Southern movement is, then, not a revolution, 
but a rebellion against the noblest of revolutions. It is 
a league of confederates against the peaceful and legal 
evolution of Liberty on this continent. It is an In- 
surrection against a Resurrection. It is Slavery, hoary 



A REBELLION vs. A REVOLUTION. 81 

tyrant of the ages, standing before Humanity's morn- 
ing, lifting its bars against the day-streaks, and crying, 
'^ Back, back, accursed Dawn, into the chambers of 
Night ! '' 

The instinct of slaveholders has probed this matter 
very accurately. They know that sunrise respects not 
the protest of owl and bat against it. They have dis- 
covered that the North Star is a ,kind of Ossawattomie 
star ; refusing to stop its light at Mason and Dixon's 
line ; sending its incendiary ray far down into cane-brake 
and dismal swamp ; finding many a poor fugitive to hold 
with its glittering eye until he is safe in the land of 
Freedom. They know that the sunlight will not respect 
the sacred soil, and that their only hope is in seeing 
that it shall shine through ^' bars." They scarcely 
rebelled in time : they will have hard work building 
the northward wall of their fortress in time to resist the 
arrows of Phoebus. But they are doing their best. 

It is a great mistake, however, for us to suppose that 
they wish to subjugate the North. They have no de- 
sire to cast themselves straight across the railroad 
where the train of Civilization must pass. It is true 
that all they desire is to be let alone. But what does it 
imply to let them alone ? It implies that a nation 
Avhich has heard at the door of its sepulchre the divine 
mandate, " Come forth ! " and whose hands and feet and 
face are already half divested of their grave-clothes, 
shall sink back again to decay, take again the napkin 



82 THE REJECTED STONE. 

about its face, surrender its tissues again to the worm. 
There is not one healthy movement of a free nation, 
not one word or step, however innocent and uncon- 
scious, which can by any possibility let Slavery alone. 
Slavery knows they cannot, if it is united with them in 
one nation : it would discover, if separated, that Civili- 
zation is no red-tapist ; and that free America cannot let 
oppression in the South alone, more than it can let it 
alone in the Old World. Plutarch tells us that Bessus, 
the Pasonian, destroyed a nest of sparrows with cru- 
elty ; and, being reproached with this wantonness, 
replied, that he destroyed them justly, since they con- 
stantly reproached him untruthfully with the murder 
of his father. Thus he disclosed his crime. What the 
twittering of innocent sparrows was to the parricide, 
such must for ever be the natural influences of Liberty 
— its free schools, its free speech, its material pro- 
gress — to parricidal Wrong the world over. Let us 
not wonder if the tyrannies of the Old World smile 
complacently at the attempt of the Southern Bessus to 
destroy the brood of Liberty in America. Freedom 
will never let them alone ; will never cease to accuse 
them; will for ever proclaim from the house-top the 
crimes the}^ have committed in the cellars and closets. 

When Lieut. Maury came down from the dome of the 
United-States Observatory, Avhere for so many years he 
had watched the stars to so little purpose, — never 
having discovered how they in their courses for ever 
'^ fight against Sisera," — to bend all he had learned 



A REBELLION vs. A REVOLUTION. 83 

there to the behest of Slavery, the first evidence the 
country had of his treachery Avas that the hght-houses 
all along the coast were darkened. It was well. 'Tis 
an exact symbol of what the Confederacy to which he 
had attached himself means. To quench all the lights 
which guide Humanity; to darken every guiding bea- 
con to which the voyagers in the ancient Night are 
looking ; to extinguish every hope lit up on the shores 
of the Future, — that is their design. " Darken the 
light-houses ! " cry the wreckers of Humanity. " Let 
no ray shine out upon the night of Oppression ! Let the 
brave ships with their immortal freightage be dashed 
upon the breakers ! for so alone can their treasures gild 
the coast of Slavery." 

Shall we now spend our blood, our time, our strength, 
fighting with Slavery for the treasures dragged from 
the waves, — wrecker against wrecker ? In that they 
will be ahead of us : their drags and nets of spoil are 
longer and better, their eagerness for their prey 
greater. Shall we rekindle those extinguished light- 
houses? Shall we see, that, all along the Atlantic and 
the Pacific and the Gulf, the rays of Freedom and Justice 
to all shine out clear and beautiful, marking for every 
struggling bark — for Germany, Hungary, Poland, for 
all — a path of light to a haven of safety and rest? 
Then we save the wrecker and the wrecked. We 
kindle lights that shine not only outward upon those 
ready to perish in the stormy waves of Old -World 
oppression, but inward upon our more pitiable fellow- 



84 THE REJECTED STONE. 

men, wandering in the darkness of crime, morally 
wrecked on the rocks of Barbarism, because America 
has hitherto failed to provide with the beacons of trade 
and power those of national righteousness and honor. 

Thus, and thus alone, we cease to be in the seat of 
George the Third, fighting against the bud that by 
normal growth would grow from our side and climb to 
its fruit. We ourselves become revolutionists against 
our own wrong. We emerge from the ancient king- 
dom of Oppression, and make this a holy war, — a 
second Revolution, achieving for the nations of the 
world more than our first achieved fur thirteen Colo- 
nies. 



XV. 



E X C A L I B U R. 

The centuries as they roll bring no season without 
its fresh laurel for the brow of King Arthur. The sun 
never rises and sets, but it leaves some new gleam of 
light on the jewelled hilt, on the fine-tempered blade, 
of Excalibur, — sword of Arthur, '^ flower of kings." 

There came a day when out of the boiling sea a 
great hand emerged, holding out this sword, with an 
inscription which declared its name, and its power, if 
wielded by its true king, to cut through iron or steel, 
or conquer the strongest foe. It was given to Arthur ; 



EXCALIBUR. 85 

for was not lie its true king, who stood for justice, for 
honor, for the cause of the Aveak and wronged? 

The virtue of the sword, as its name indicates, laj^ 
in its Cahbre. It was no larger than other swords ,* 
hut its quality was finer. Character is more than size , 
and the sword that defends the innocent and the 
wronged must, in the end, win the day. So, in the hand 
of Arthur, Excalibur never failed. 

At length, the noble King Arthur drew near his end. 
Then went he, with one of his knights, near to the sea, 
and Excalibur was cast therein : again the great white 
hand emerged, and caught the sword. The legend runs, 
that soon afterward the king himself was borne away 
to some happy isle by nymphs. But he never died ; 
and the prophecies remained, that, when his race — our 
race — shall be worthy to receive him. King Arthur 
the Imperishable shall return, bringing with him Exca- 
libur the Unconquerable. 

All along the line of our army, — from the Chesapeake 
to the Missouri, — many eyes have strained to meet 
one like thine, Arthur ! flower of kings. We have 
watched night and day, if through the dust and smoke 
of any conflict we could see the trusty Excalibur flash- 
ing in the light. It is not there : so we gain or lose as 
the fortune of war may decide. With Excalibur there 
is no chance, but certainty. 

When we are worthy to receive him ; when we stand 
true Knights of Humanity ; when we have set our 
hearts to strike for the innocent and Avronged ; when 

8 



86 THE REJECTED STONE. 

we have bound ourselves by a lioly conapact, as a Legion 
of Honor, to strike down those who raise themselves 
upon the weak, — then the royal Soul of our race shall 
rise, and return to lead us ; and the sword that never 
failed shall carve the path of our victory through every 
^^ bar/' and bring back the thirty-two stars as jewels in 
its hilt. 

As yet, the watchers must sit by the foaming, seeth- 
ing sea of events, awaiting the great hand, and the 
sword which alone can win the day for America. Not 
yet, not yet. As yet, our leaders turn their faces from 
the hunted fugitive, even if forced to receive him ; as 
yet, the soldier's sword has not the calibre to carve the 
iron of the slave's manacle. When our Anglo-Saxon 
blood mounts to its royal height, and grasps its final, 
noblest weapon, four million chains will fall ; nay, six 
million hearts, whose drugged blood owns the same 
fountain with ours, will cast off the virus which has 
maddened them, and every State hasten as a Knight to 
the Table where Arthur reigns. 

Why does not this nation at once draw this sword ? 
Why does it not, owning what is whispered in every 
heart, that this war means freedom for all or chains for 
all, at once inscribe '^ Emancipation " on its banner? 

No one questions that Slavery is the cause of this 
Rebellion. 

No one questions that to recover the Union as it was 
— i.e., with Slavery in it — is to recover the elements 



EXCALIBUR. 87 

that have led to this collision, and must bring it on again 
whenever the Slave interest thinks itself strong enough 
for another effort. 

No one questions but that the only alternative of this 
will be the subjugation of the North in a moral sense, 
— the suspension over the ballot-box of the hair-strung 
sword of civil war ; so that fear, and not conviction, 
shall decide every election. 

No one questions that Slavery is the one stain and 
blot which disgraces our flag, and cripples our progress ; 
and that, but for the absence of any power to extermi- 
nate it in the Constitution, the nation should and would 
have abolished it for ever. 

No one questions, that, by the appeal which Slavery 
has made to an arbitrament beside the Constitution, 
compelling the temporary obedience to military law 
and military necessity, by which the Constitution itself 
has provided for its own possible suspension, our na- 
tion has a right to strike at the very root of the evil, 
which, so long as it remained subject to the Constitu- 
tion, it must tolerate. 

No one questions the position of John Quincy Adams, 
that the power to abolish Slavery is contained in the 
war-power. 

Yet, in this war, law has been as often suspended in 
favor of Slavery as against it : for it is a direct violation 
uf law for one of our soldiers or military officers to 
return a fugitive slave ; such return being provided for 
in due form of law, and assigned to appointed civil offi- 



88 THE REJECTED STONE. 

cers. Where, by the growing compulsion of events, 
our Government has been compelled to retain slaves, it 
has done so with all the tenderness for the South that 
a mother might show for her pet babe. To-day comes 
the news, that, by a final decision, escaping slaves shall 
be retained, whether belonging to loyal or disloyal ; but, 
as if frightened at reaching this dizzy height of resolu- 
tion, the order of the Secretary of War immediately pro- 
vides, that any slave, wishing to return to the service 
from which he has escaped, shall have no let or hinder- 
ance ! We quote this, not as an instance of unfaithfulness 
to Freedom, but as an example of the infatuation and ter- 
ror which seem to seize upon and confuse all our public 
men when they touch this question of property in man. 
Any one whose wits are about him can see, that, by this 
order, any treacherous Negro of Governor Letcher's 
household may be bribed into escaping to Fortress 
Monroe, and, after suitable observations, " voluntarily 
return," to give such information, as, at Manasses, the 
rebels had, by their own account, to pay a hundred 
thousand dollars for. 

Why this timidity ? Why this overweening tender- 
ness with human bondage ? One would suppose that a 
system repulsive to all the instincts of Humanity, which 
can exist only by a toleration almost barbaric, would be 
at once crushed when it became an outlaw and a foe ; 
but here we are pirouetting amongst its interests as 
daintily as Mignon among the eggs she dares not break. 
Wherefore ? 



EXCALIBUR. 89 

Not because any member of this Administration loves 
Slavery, but because the Government fears to divide 
its physical forces ; that is, to alienate certain persons 
in the North and (supposed) in the South from the 
cause of the Union itself, as separate from the Slavery 
question : in fact, for the, soke of certain persons, who, in 
case of a direct issue between the American Union and 
Slavery, would take sides with Slavery. 

But if such men should, unwashed, put forth their 
hands to defend the Union, would it not be a sure proof 
that it would be the old tar-and-feather Union, — a 
Union not fit to be saved? 

Unto their assembly, mine honor, be not thou united ! 

Indeed it is, in the eyes of every lover of universal 
Freedom, the highest mission of this conflict to liberate 
this land from the influence of that vile Northern 
Mephistopheles, — the party which has in every way 
fostered the arrogance of Slavery, and encouraged the 
madness of the South ; which it is now forced to abandon 
in the conflict to which it has seduced that misguided 
section. The guilt of this Rebellion is not heaviest on 
Dixie's Land, by any means. 

These Tories would be a drag and a curse to our side, 
if they should espouse it. The hearts of freemen the 
world over would shrink back chiUed and distrustful. 

" We shall march conquering, — not through their presence ; 
Songs shall inspirit us, — not from their lyre; 
Deeds shall be done, — whilst they boast their quiescence, 
Still bidding crouch, whom the rest bade aspire." 



90 THE REJECTED STONE. 

XVI. 

A FELICITATION. 

In the pecuniary crisis of 1857, Stackpole, on hearing 
that a certain bank had gone under, exclaimed, " Bully 
for that bank ! " His astonished auditors asked why 
his admiration was elicited for a bank that had just 
broken. ^^ Broke ! " exclaimed Stackpole, amazed at 
their stupidity : ^' Avell, why shouldn't it break ? What 
else were banks made for ? But see how long it held 
out, — fourteen days ! ThaVs what I call a bully 
bank ! " 

Perhaps, on the same principle, we should say, " Bully 
for the Democratic party ! " Of course, we expected 
it to go for the South, in the end. What else was it 
meant for ? We were scarcely so green as to expect 
that Slavery's Northern factotum would ever seriously 
pass through a crisis involving a cessation, even tem- 
porary, of such stated religious services as the abuse 
of the North and glowing eulogy of the South, to say 
nothing of having such a means of grace as hunting 
fugitive Humanity for our Southern brethren disturbed 
by the " contraband " neology, without breaking down. 
We had, from the first, prepared our ears to hear a 
chorus of somewhat cracked voices singing the plaintive 
melody, " Carry me back ! " This was en regie. It was 
what the metaphysicians call the " structural and normal 
development of its central idea." 



A FELICITATION. 91 

But, on the whole, we feel a disposition to be duly 
thankful at the result. It cannot be denied that the 
party held out pretty well. It has failed at last, but 
not without losing many of its most talented leaders, 
and being fearfully decimated in numbers. It has not 
even enjoyed the delight of coming out in an open lick- 
ing of its quondam master's hand. ^^ Hypocrisy," says 
the French satirist, ^' is the homage that vice pays to 
virtue." The South is too shrewd not to see that the 
quasi support of this Government, under which the par- 
ty conventions have found it necessary to conceal the 
poison they would administer, is an attestation of the 
true temper of the masses they hope to control, — 
the homage that disloyalty finds it necessary to pay 
to the throned patriotism of the people. 

There is really no cause for apprehending any evil 
from these sitters on the fence. In due time, as we 
have said, the fence will be so sharp, that those who 
try it will be cut in two. But meanwhile it may be 
held as a general truth, that those who have not the 
courage to take a stand on either side will scarcely 
have courage or strength to help our cause, if they 
should adopt it. On looking over the early chronicles 
of our first Revolution, we find that our earnest and 
patriotic fathers had to contend with a vast deal more 
of disloyalty than we have now. The historians give us 
evidence, that, even so late as after the destruction of 
tea in Boston Harbor, a man might have been roughly 
handled in Boston who should have advocated a com- 



92 THE EEJECTED STONE. 

plete separation from England. It was some time after 
the battle of Bunker Hill that this separation became 
an avowed object of the war. More people in this 
country are now to be found who advocate a complete 
casting- off of the yoke of Slavery, than, at the same 
stage of the first Revolution, were in favor of casting 
off the yoke of England ; and just in the proportion, 
that, under the tuition of events, our country then rose 
to greater earnestness and bolder steps, the number of 
sycophant Tories increased all over the country. Some 
of the most fearful scenes of bloodshed occurred between 
the Revolutionists and the Tories. 

Now see how much better off we are. Val. and 
Breck. are protected in Washington by their very 
insignificance. The Tory Conventions, with all their 
pusillanimous talk, are to-day regarded, by the best men 
of the party they claim to represent, as only the hanging- 
out of crape upon its door, to indicate that the pulses 
of the living no longer beat through its veins. 

There is one — and only one — way in which these 
Northern Tories and dapper neutrals can work us an 
injury ; and that is by being regarded by our Govern- 
ment at Washington as a party worthy to be considered 
in any of its measures, or of any efibrt at its concilia- 
tion. Let our Government have no Mrs. Grundy after 
whose opinions to inquire in the solemn emergency. 
Let it be brave and earnest, knowing that the great 
heart of the people moves with it ; knowing, too, that, 
in these high magnetic conditions, the people see very 



TO THE PRESIDE2^"T OF THE UNITED STATES. 93 

shrewdly into affairs. It is through inattention or in- 
difference that they are usually hoodwinked by politi- 
cians : now they are neither inattentive nor indifferent ; 
and the demagogues will soon find that it is they who 
are hoodwinked in thinking so. We have no fear what- 
ever of the verdict that the people will pass upon the 
contemptible and selfish determination of these men to 
decline all exertion to save the temple of Liberty from 
the flames that threatened to envelop it, and sit down to 
boil their party-pots in the fire. 



XVII. 

TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. 

Honored Sir: — 

From the many conflicting and vague statements 
with which the telegraph fills the air, one seems to have 
obtained the clearness and authenticity of a fact ; this, 
namely, — that Garibaldi, the patriot wdiose knightly 
kiss broke the evil spell which bound the Sleeping 
Beauty of the Mediterranean, whose sword has carved a 
gateway through the age-hardened prison-walls of Italy, 
has sent word to America, "7/^ this war is for Freedom^ 
I come with tiventy thousarid men.''^ 

Garibaldi, sir, is a symbol. The spirit of this age lias 
produced him ; and miUions in every land recognize in 



94 THE REJECTED STONE. 

him the appearance in our age of the Forerunner, — the 
Voice in the Wilderness that has never failed any age, 
and that cries now, as of old, ^' Prepare ye the way of 
the Lord : make his paths straight. And now also the 
axe is laid to the root of the tree : every tree that 
bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast 
into the fire.'' 

There are also in our midst other symbols. Never 
was there a Moses without his Pharaoh ; never a John 
without his Herod. We have a party that has gained a 
certain fictitious strength by Wrong and Deceit; and 
their leaders say, '^As soon as this is a tear for Freedom, 
tve leave you, taking our twenty thousand menJ^ 

Between these two symbols you are compelled to 
choose, — Garibaldi and millions of Garibaldini all over 
the world, who can draw no sword but for Justice and 
Liberty, on the one hand ; and, on the other, the Pro- 
slavery politicians, who hate Liberty more than all else, 
and whose half-hearted, muttering support to this Go- 
vernment is given only in the ratio of that Government's 
servility to Slavery. As Garibaldi is only known as the 
hero of European Liberty, so are Vallandigham, Rich- 
mond, & Co. known only for the extent to which they 
have crawled on their bellies before Slavery, and the 
malignancy with which they have sought to wound 
the heel of Humanity. To accept one of these j^arties 
is to refuse the other. 

The American people look on very anxiously to see 
to which of these you will turn, and which you will con- 



TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. 95 

sequently make up your mind to alienate. This much 
any one may say for the American people. Further 
than this, each one can speak only for himself; and 
since, by the nature of our institutions, the responsi- 
bility for what is done by our Government must be 
shared to some extent by the humblest individual, it 
becomes the solemn duty of every man, who has an ear- 
nest conviction, to utter it, — as it is of every man, 
who can strike a blow for his country, to strike it. 

Now, therefore, I, sir, the writer of these pages, who 
have seen my native State, the natural garden-spot of 
this country, withered and wasted by Slavery ; who 
have seen its race of honorable and upright men disap- 
pear before a population of pygmies ; who, exiled to the 
North, have seen there how a nation can turn from its 
great birthright to be warped and ruined by receiving 
into its system a great moral poison, sugared over by an 
important interest, — have seen there the best and 
bravest men alienated from, and enlisted against, a 
country in which they found no place unless their most 
sacred convictions were laid down at the threshold, 
whilst the only titles to places of trust or power were 
supple knee-joints and pliant vertebration ; and who, 
having known these things, arose one blessed morning, 
and, invoking the benison of Heaven on a bit of paper 
Avhich bore the name of Abraham Lincoln, cast then my 
first vote, hoping that it might be for the liberation of 
this country from a great and dwarfing crime, — do 
now implore the President to accept the proffer of 



96 THE REJECTED STONE. 

Giuseppo Garibaldi, and thereby proclaim to the world 
that this country links its destiny with that of Uni- 
versal Freedom. 

The only test of our good flxith in this is, that the 
world shall at once see inscribed on our banner, " Im- 
mediate AND Unconditional Emancipation." 

1. It is legal. Your Excellency is sworn to execute 
the laws : therefore you cannot even consider a measure 
that is violative of the Constitution and laws. The Con- 
stitution and laws, in providing for possible war, do, in 
case of war, at once deliver up the Government to the 
laws of war ; so that to follow the letter of the Constitu- 
tion in times of war, when military law and advantage 
demanded the contrary, would be violating the Consti- 
tution. There are times when the Constitution can only 
be obeyed by its temporary suspension at the command 
of the universal and necessary code, which, in common 
with the organic law of all nations, it recognizes. The 
suspension of the Habeas Corpus, and the discussion 
which followed it, have made it perfectly clear to the 
people, that, in each case where it was suspended, it 
would have been unconstitutional to follow the ordinary 
provision of the Constitution. It needs no discussion to 
prove that the same laws, which take from a traitor the 
ordinary form and process of law, may deprive an insti- 
tution, that proves traitorous and deadly to the country, 
of its ordinary guaranties. It thus becomes simply a 
question of whether Slavery stands in this attitude to- 
wards the country. 



TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. 97 

2. It is just. The South AvoukI destroy the Union, 
in the interest of Slavery. The Nation must destroy 
Slavery, in the interest of the Union. 

In the interest of Slavery, the territorial integrity of 
the country has been destroyed, and some arms, forts, 
and money seized. Is that all ? If so, perhaps the 
account between this Nation and Slavery might be set- 
tled by the repentance of Slavery, and a return of the 
stolen articles. 

But it is less than a centime of the account which 
this nation holds against Slavery. Years of usurpation 
and corruption ; of insults and abuses heaped upon 
Freedom, in whatever form it tried to maintain its slight 
foothold on the continent ; years now summed up, and 
culminant in a frantic civil -war, involving the daily 
expenditure of millions, the perversion of the means 
and powers of the people, the suspension and lasting 
injury of trade, the re-instating of piracy on the high 
seas ; more than all, the death of vast numbers of the 
youth of America, and the darkening of tens of thousands 
of hitherto happy homes, — all these are in the account 
that this nation has now to settle with Slavery. Can 
they be repaid by the conquest of what forces the South 
can bring into the field ? Will it be enough if Slavery 
should at length agree to ground its arms until it is 
stronger? Can it be settled by a truce of one or two 
or ten years ? Is the balance struck, if we have the old 
Union, with the old causes at work in it, to bring forth 
like results in the future? 

9 



98 THE REJECTED STONE. 

Justice can be satisfied in that alone which satisfies 

Wisdom, THE UTTER DESTRUCTION OF SLAVERY. In no 

other way can we act up to the lessons which Slavery 
has taught us of its own blasting nature ; in no other 
way can we, as a nation, obtain that blessing for which 
we have already paid the full price in treasure and 
blood, — the riddance from the accursed evil under 
which we have groaned ever since we became a nation. 

This is justice to ourselves. I have not mentioned 
that higher justice which is due to four milhons of 
human beings, cruelly deprived of '^ the right to life, 
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," which our 
nation, in the pure aspirations of its youth, meant to 
secure for all. You are bound to stand by legal formu- 
las. Yet I cannot forget what I once heard you say, 
with luminous words, that seemed to shine out like 
responses to the everlasting stars that then and there 
gleamed above you : " Every man that comes into the 
world has a mouth to be fed, and a back to be clothed. 
By a notable coincidence, each has also two hands. 
Now, I take it that those hands were meant to feed 
that mouth, and clothe that back ; and any institution 
that deprives them of that right, and the rights deduci- 
ble from it, strikes at the very roots of natural justice, 
which is also political wisdom.'' 

I pray you, Mr. President, to remember, that, when 
the laws of war permit you to restore millions to those 
natural rights, every day thereafter that they remain 
deprived of them will be traceable to your own door ! 



TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. 99 

3. It is merciful. Xot only merciful to the slave, 
that he should have this cruel and galling yoke that 
binds him to the plane of the brute removed ; not only 
merciful to us, that the heart-burnings and animosities 
which have rent our land should be laid by the eradica^ 
tion of their cause ; not only merciful to posterity, that 
this fearful and irrepressible source of trouble and guilt 
should not be bequeathed to them ; but, more than to 
these or to all others, a decree of emancipation would 

be MERCIFUL TO THE SoUTH. 

Up from broad and beautiful plains, worn out and 
desolate ; from undrained marshes and swamps, whose 
very Avealth has turned to malaria ; from the locked 
treasures of gold and iron in Virginia and the Carolinas ; 
from the eighty-five thousand white adults in Virginia 
who cannot read or write, and the even more fearful 
proportions of ignorance in more Southern States ; from 
the young men trained to licentiousness and idleness, 
Avhose remnant of strength is to-day given to the mon- 
ster which has ruined them ; from the tearful, anxious 
eyes of mothers, wives, sisters, whose souls know the 
agony of seeing the son, brother, and husband the easy 
prey of the temptations that cannot be escaped, — oh ! 
from all these, sir, would come a response to your 
decree for Liberty : ^' Merciful, most merciful ! '' 

There is a weak love that yields and indulges ; there 
is a great and divine love that spares not to smite when 
to smite is best, — ever giving what is wanted more 
than what is wished. An old legend relates that in the 



100 THE REJECTED STONE. 

court of King Arthur was a poor dwarf, named Carl. 
He was much pitied by the king and his court, and 
there were stern orders that none should harm the poor 
dwarf. It was also supposed that CarPs mind was de- 
fective ; for he every day went about the court with a 
sword, beseeching each knight to cut off his head with 
it. The knights, of course, would refuse to slay the 
dwarf, who, they supposed, wished thus to be relieved 
of life. At length, on a day, the dwarf stood before 
Sir Gawain, and with a voice full of earnest appeal, 
and with tears in his eyes, said, " Gawain, canst thou 
not love me enough to smite off my head with this 
sword?'' Sir Gawain was so moved by this, that, in 
an instant, he seized the sword, and cut off the poor 
dwarf's head. 

Poor dwarf no longer ! The evil spell which had 
bound him in his misshapen form, until one of Arthur's 
knights should cut off his head, was now broken, and, in 
noble and knightly form and guise. Sir Carleton stood 
where poor Carl was before. 

Ah, 'tis a great, a godlike mercy which can smite its 
object ! 

And there are dwarfs upon earth, from age to age, 
that only thus can have the evil spell broken, and rise 
to their full stature. Sometimes these dwarfs are 
States. 

4. There is no real obstacle or danger in the way of 
it. I know there are seeming lions in the path; but 
several pilgrim nations have gone that way, and found 



TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. 101 

the lions chained each side, and impotent. We have 
been told that dreadful scenes and vindictive actions 
follow emancipation; that the Negroes will not labor 
but as slaves, and thus become idlers on a nation's 
hands. The facts bear otherwise. 

There is yet to be shown the State, that emancipated 
its slaves, which did not at once rise above the stature 
into which it was before dwarfed. 

It has 5^et to be shown that Right has ever wronged 
any. 

If, under the formidable circumstances which now 
surround our nation, we should fear the expenses or 
the labors attending such a step, mark how Haiti stands 
ready to bear a hand to the holy work. The Queen of 
the Antilles sits there with her ungathered wealth 
about her, her spices and fruits gilding every wave 
around her shores, awaiting the ten millions of gather- 
ers to whom she can yet give a hospitable home. One 
word from you, sir, and she is a recognized sister Re- 
public. Another word, and, whilst African troops march 
on to see that your decree is executed, the aged, the 
women and children, which we can scarcely sustain, 
are borne away to the happy clime where no fevers nor 
lashes await them. 

5. It is the only path to a real success. We justly 
count as a great natural fortress against Secession that 
mountain range stretching from Pennsylvania almost to 
the Gulf, — whose brave and hardy inhabitants have 
justified Milton's designation of Freedom as ^' a mountain 



102 THE REJECTED STONE. 

nymph : " why should we overlook the milHons of the 
oppressed stretchmg into every branch and twig of 
Southern society, who, by the laws of God, are our 
natural allies, unless, by our inhumanity, we drive them 
to the side of the enemy ? Is it best to have seven 
hundred thousand fighting men of the South our ene- 
mies, when we can make them our friends ? We have 
certain knowledge that we have been represented 
to that class as their bitterest foes : they have been told 
that our plan was to slay a proportion of them, and 
banish the rest. This falsehood has been systematically 
and carefully circulated throughout the cabins and 
plantations, and justified by the most religious South- 
erners as a necessity of defence. We have done 
nothing to disabuse the slave's mind in this particular. 
Consequently, although here and there a knowing 
Negro has been able to do this for us, the mass has 
been deceived, and is working most devotedly against 
us. 

At this rate, we shall be defeated, and, as I think, 
deservedly. 

But this war must, as now conducted, prove more 
and more a disheartening one to our people and our 
soldiers. 

As at Manasses our men conquered one battery, only 
to find tAvo more opening upon that, we all have a mis- 
giving that a victory over the South would lead to the 
most painful complications. We must hold on to our 
victory after we have got it; for it will have a perpetual 



TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. 103 

tendency to elude us. It was, you remember, a difficult 
problem to decide, whether the wolf, or the man who, 
having caught him, had to hold him fast, was made 
captive by the exploit. If the cause of the hatred of 
the South to the North and the nation and to free 
government were removed, their rage against these 
would still remain in the breast of the present Southern 
generation; but for a generation we could hold them 
quiet. The hatred might even be transmitted to the 
next generation: that, too, might be held. But in this 
age, as we see in the case of France and England, feuds 
must gradually be worn away before advancing com- 
mercial and other interests ; and, with the root of Dis- 
union plucked up, the third generation at the South, 
and perhaps the next, would thank us for the painful 
surgery with which we saved them, and we should be 
bound together by all natural ties, — ties which Slavery 
alone holds in abeyance now. If this fair prospect 
were ahead, our people would forget in its glory the 
pains and deprivations of the present, and go forward 
animated by that faith which is the substance of things 
hoped for. 

Moreover, the many disheartening circumstances that 
press upon us now would be removed. To the soldier, 
applause is sweet. But we have heard no plaudits from 
the world looking on, — none from England or France 
or Germany or Italy. They cried ^^Brava ! " to America, 
when our ballots bore you, sir, to the Capitol : they are 
silent now that our bayonets would defend your right 



104 THE REJECTED STONE. 

there. We hear from over the seas only cold calcula- 
tions of the probable issue. The civilized world stands 
ready with an equal welcome to either party that suc- 
ceeds. These cold buckets, which are cast upon a con- 
flict so sacred to us, we have invited, by placing the 
issue on the lowest plane of which it was susceptible. 

But this could not be, if, in the face of the world, Ave 
rose to the standard of right and civilization which those 
very nations have uplifted, and up to which even Russia 
has come before us. We ourselves have from the first 
held — hold now — the power to decide the posture of 
every foreign nation toward this Rebellion. Apart 
from Slavery, England can only see in the Southern 
movement the presentation to our own lips of the chalice 
we once offered hers. In this she is right. We are 
wrong and presumptuous in any complaint. But the 
civilized world is antislavery ; and if, in this war, we 
did but touch the hem of Liberty's vesture, we should 
be thrilled with an inspiration and sympathy which 
would soon make us every whit whole. We should 
come in contact with that electric belt which binds the 
hearts of freemen round the world ; and up from every 
nation and clime would swell the vivas and hravas and 
Imrralis which would make our every soldier thrice a 
soldier, and cheer us on to a victory which every eye 
would see already written in the book of Fate. 

6. It is thus alone that 3^our Excellency can be faith- 
ful to your parole of honor to the United States. You 
have nobly discerned that your oath of office required 



TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. 105 

yoTi to preserve the Union and the Constitution at any 
cost. You can hardly fail to remember that the Ameri- 
can people, in electing you over candidates representing 
all varieties of opinion, declared that certain principles 
should prevail in the Government of this country, — 
principles to which you had pledged your allegiance. 
When afterward the alternatives of this painful conflict, 
or the abandonment of the principles on which you were 
elected, were again and again presented to the American 
people, they again and again refused any and every 
compromise of those principles, whatever the result 
might be. You cannot be true to them, if you compro- 
mise them, or fail to defend them. Slavery would now 
wrest more than half of this country from its allegiance to 
those principles. Either the Principle which placed you 
in office, or the Institution which is in deadly grip with 
it, must fall to the ground. 

Remember, sir, that the people did not place you 
in office to preserve the Union merely : that they had 
under Fillmore and Buchanan and Pierce ; and they 
might have retained it by electing Breckinridge instead 
of yourself But, not doing so, they declared that the 
Union should be administered in the interest of Free- 
dom, even more than in the interest of peace and con- 
ciliation. To that end your honor stands plighted. 
If any peace shall come in which that end is lost, the 
country is defeated, whatever victory its mihtary arm 
may have achieved. 

Can you, sir, preserve the United States with Slavery 



106 THE REJECTED STONE. 

therein? Will Slavery ever be united with the prin- 
ciples you represent ? Is not the effort to make it so 
akin to the effort at any chemic impossibility, — as the 
union exclusively of fire and water, of oil and alcohol ? 

It is not by presenting to the country its old hulls, 
riveted with steel or welded with fire together, that 
you can fulfil your trust. It is not by returning us 
a Union in which it w^ill be virtually impossible ever 
to elect another Republican President, for fear of an- 
other insurrection. That would be to restore us a 
country bound hand and foot. If Freedom can alone be 
free by the destruction of Slavery, you cannot, in honor, 
flinch from signing the death-w^arrant of that system. 

In the ancient Promethean games, each racer bore in 
his hand a lighted torch. The one who first reached 
the goal, with his torch still lighted, w^on the prize. If 
he came in foremost, but with torch extinguished, the 
later comer, who came in with lighted torch, was de- 
clared victor. 

No victory in this war can be a victory to America, 
which does not bring in, bright and burning, the torch 
of Liberty, — ay, of African Liberty, as far as the people 
by their last election declared that they could and 
would control and hmit it, — wdiich the Nation gave 
you, lighted, to bear in their van. And, if Slavery has 
resolved to stake its life on the wresting of rights 
which the people have irrevocably denied it, either that 
life or the verdict of the nation must be sacrificed. 
Which shall it he? The people decided the question 



TO THE PEESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. 107 

when they accepted a war with the South rather than 
a denial of their principles ; and to it, unless their rulers 
debauch them, thej will stand. We claim of you that 
you shall fulfil Frederick the Great's definition of a 
prince as " the first of subjects/' and prove it by being 
the last to yield the standard which they have lifted, 
and of which you are the symbol. 

By proclaiming Freedom to all, white or black, who 
will rally to the defence of our imperilled banner, you 
are told that you will make enemies to yourself and the 
cause of the nation. You may, sir, make of secret 
enemies open ones. The serpent that now creeps in 
the grass may think it safe to come into the path ; but 
that will be a benefit. It would be not the least good 
of recognizing a direct issue with Slavery, that it 
would be a better detective than Vidocq of the secret 
traitors, who, whilst sentimentalizing about the Union, 
really hold it as secondary and subservient to Slavery, 
and only refrain from mutiny on the Ship of State be- 
cause they hope to make it a slaver before the voyage 
is over. 
4 But, sir, when the half-hearted go, the whole-hearted 
^ arrive. The Albany and Columbus cliques are a cheap 
^3rice to pay for the Garibaldis with their twenty thou- 
sands. 

There is, honored sir, a class of men in this country 
but little known, — men who have been kept out of the 
politics and parties by which the forces of a country 
are usually gauged, because of an enthusiasm for Li- 



108 THE REJECTED STONE. 

berty and a hatred of Slavery, as intense and devoted 
as the enthusiasm for Slavery and the hatred of Free- 
dom which the South is showing. They are men who 
have sacrificed the fair prospects of life, the wealth and 
power which usually absorb men, for a truer devotion 
to the cause of the weak and degraded, even against 
the nation when it was wrong. They are men who 
hold their lives at the beck and call of Justice. They 
stand to-day hand on hilt, and await the one word at 
which their swords flash out. 

That word is Emancipation. 

These are not men that require to be waked up, nor 
do they need a long drill : they have long been wide 
awake, and they were born drilled. Only let that 
countersign, which Nature wrote on their hearts when 
they came into the world, be uttered, and you shall see 
again, the Scourges of God, the Avengers, the Men of 
Des-^y, — men born to conquer Slavery, as is the eagle 
to destroy the serpent that coils about its nest, — sweep- 
ing downward from every plain and hill, riding on every 
wind, until Humanity is avenged, the Tyrant and his 
host overthrown, and Peace bends once more her blue 
vault over a happy land, unflecked by a cloud of wrong, 
glorious with the sun-burst of impartial Freedom. 

But, sir, besides this resource, upon which you have 
not drawn, even if you know of its existence, — a re- 
source upon which only the Liberty which includes the 
slave can draw, — I believe you would find that the peo- 
ple are generally prepared for this measure. 



TO THE PHESIDEXT OF THE UNITED STATES. 109 

The very appearances of division and disloyalty in 
the Xorth, which may intimidate our leaders, may 
Avell be considered indications of a growing and bolder 
feeling among the masses. The appearance of activity 
amongst the compromisers is an indication of an in- 
creasing exasperation amongst the people against this 
Rebellion, and a deepening conviction that a blow at 
the cause of it is necessary. The uprising of one 
sentiment is always attended by the excitation of its 
antagonist. 

War is a swift and infallible educator. The old man- 
sion yet stands at Perth Amboy, where, in the midst of 
the American Revolution, the British Howe, having 
called for a conference with the Americans, met John 
Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Edward Rutledge, and 
proposed to them a grant from England of relief from 
the taxes under which they had groaned, and a full am- 
nesty, if they would lay down their arms. How they 
would have leapt at the offer a little before ! At Con- 
cord, at Lexington, every American musket would have 
fallen to the ground before such a proposition. 

Bunker Hill came : we were defeated there. 

But there stands the monument of which every Ame- 
rican is justly most proud, though it stands on the field 
where we were defeated ; for there the gate of compro- 
mise with the oppressor dosed for ever. 

When our fathers began their Revolution, it was 
against an unjust tax. Its removal would have closed 

10 



110 THE EEJECTED STONE. 

the matter at once. After a few months of war, its 
removal and many other privileges are offered ; but 
the war has unsealed a higher aim. To the compromise 
proposition, our flithers rephed, ^' No : this war ends 

ONLY with the ENTIRE INDEPENDENCE OF AMERICA." 

I think, sir, that, even at this stage of our second 
revolution against an internal tyrant, the concession 
of an amnesty to Slavery on condition of its grounding 
arms would be with difficulty obtained from the people ; 
and that the indignation which a few weeks ago would 
have been allayed by the return of forts, and call for 
a convention on the part of the South, rises each day, 
and cannot now be restrained from the natural climax 
that will sweep the source of all our evils and discords 
out of our land for ever. 

Thus, and thus alone, can we have an enduring- 
peace. Short of this, it is difficult to see even in a vic- 
tory any thing but an armistice which shall be the 
armistice of a generation of cowards, evading a task 
because it is hard, by adjourning one thrice as hard for 
their children. 

Sir, 'tis not often in this world that to one man is 
given the magnificent opportunity which the madness 
of a great wrong has placed within your reach. 

For the first time, there stands a man in the Earth 
empowered to break four millions of fetters from the 
hands, minds, and hearts of immortal beings. 

What prophetic tongue can tell of the plaudits that 
reach far into the procession of the ages, or of the free 



TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. Ill 

glad voices wliicli shall deliver from generation to ge- 
neration the name and the story of the lowly youth, — 
the honest laborer, — the President who uplifted a race 
from the dungeon of Slavery, and cleared a nation's 
path straight to its sublime destiny? 

But, ah ! see what a precipice stretches downward 
from this sunlit summit ! Far happier the rude boy, 
with his axe, unnamed, than one on whom Earth's mil- 
lions of eyes shall turn, only to remember that he could 
have saved mankind, but faltered and failed. 

Woe to him to wdiom four millions of slaves shall point 
their shackled hands, and say, " There is just the one 
man, whom, out of Earth's millions, God elected as him 
who should have power to remove our yokes, to raise 
us from beasts of burden to men ; unsealing for us the 
fountains of affection, hope, aspiration, which the Father 
has provided as living water for his weary children. 
He swooned on the great moment. 

' Blot out his name, then ; record one lost soul more, 
One task more declined, one more footpath untrod, 
One more triumph for devils, and sorrow for angels ; 
One wrong more to man, one more insult to God.' " 

Woe to him whom posterity, reaping its bitter harvest 
of agitation and affliction from the dire root of all our 
evils, shall remember only to curse as the one who, alone 
of all men in the history of this nation, stood on the mo- 
ment and the spot wdiere it was legal and practicable to 
pluck up the roots of the infernal tree, but who filled 
to put forth his hand. 



112 THE REJECTED STONE. 

Mr. President^ History stands with the blank scroll 
before her : her pen she holds ready ; the next word you 
must dictate. Shall it be Slavery or Freedom? 



XVIII. 
TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. 

Old legends state, that once, in the midst of the city 
of Rome, a vast and fearful chasm opened. The people 
fled in terror to their Oracles, Avhich said, ^' When that 
which is in Rome is most precious shall be cast therein, 
the chasm will be closed." 

Then did each Roman — old and young, man and 
maid — bring of their treasures the richest, and cast 
therein ; but yet the abyss yawned wider and wider in 
the city's heart. 

At length, a j^oung man rose before the council, and 
said, '^ Romans, what is it that Rome holds most pre- 
cious ? Is it not her Manhood?'' Thus saying, he 
leaped into the chasm, and it closed above him for ever. 

It is not all fable. In every nation, the abyss has at 
some time yawned, and closed only by the sacrifice 
of manhood. 

Under the heart of America, it opens to-day. We be- 
gan by casting in this and that treasure. One brought 
his compromise, another his diplomacy, another his mili- 
tarv fame : still the abvss closed not. 



TO THE AMEKICAN PEOPLE. 113 

Is there not, then, in America any thing precious 
enough to close it ? My brothers, it is not the order of 
this universe that an emergency should come to brute 
or man or nation for which — if to pass it be lawful — 
the strength has not been prepared. When wings are 
formed in the eggj and no atmosphere provided to sus- 
tain them, — when eyes are fashioned in the womb, and 
no sun rises to meet them, — then may you believe that 
a nation worthy to survive is committed to an ordeal for 
which there are no resources, or insuflScient ones. 

Resources there are in this land, did we only draw 
upon them, which would close this war with the closing 
of this year. 

Into this chasm America's Manhood must leap. 

It is not manhood that fights for its own freedom, 
holding itself ready to " crush with an iron hand " 
others who would seek their freedom. 

It is not manhood that raises a question of rule over 
a question of Humanity. 

It is not manhood that apologizes for every blow 
it is compelled to give to the greatest wrong against 
man. 

It is not manhood that fears or distrusts the conse- 
quences of doing right. 

When this becomes a war of our manhood, — i.e. a war 
for Humanity, — then the abyss will close ; not before. 
Many treasures may be swallowed up ere that Curtius 
comes. 



114 THE REJECTED STONE. 

Americans ! for the first time in many years you have 
an administration that really represents you. Your 
President is, by history and habit and sympathy, one of 
the people : he has not lived long enough in Washing- 
ton to get on that political tripod Avhich destroys the 
current of connection with the heart of the masses. 
However much individuals may be dissatisfied with the 
present management at Washington, there are many 
proofs that it represents the average status of the 
masses. As, then, we the people grow, it will grow; 
as our energy ripens, the Government will ripen. 
When Yallandigham is not sent from Ohio, his treason 
will not be tolerated at Washington. Be sure that the 
President will mirror your manhood when it arrives. 

Bring forward the strength of your manhood, my 
countrymen, to whatever post of labor you are ap- 
pointed ! We need Ellsworths of the press, Winthrops 
of the fireside, Lyons of the pulpit. We need not only 
the brave men who shall defend the standards when 
they are lifted up, but earnest hearts who shall lift 
them Tip, — ay, upon the very towers of Humanity and 
Freedom. We need a banner on which every eye of 
the earth, looking, shall see written its freedom and joy. 
We need a school of seers, of prophets, who, as of old, 
shall cry aloud and spare not, shoAving the evils, the 
inhumanities, which must be conquered in ourselves, 
before we are worthy to fight for, and win, the victo- 
ries of Right over Wrong, of Freedom over Slavery. 
Liberty's arm is not shortened that it cannot save ; but 



TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. 115 

our iniquities have come between us and that arm. 
Let every tongue that can speak be touched witn a Hve 
coal from the altar of God ; let every pen that can write 
be dipped in the truest blood of an earnest heart ; let 
every arm that can strike nerve itself to smite or be 
smitten for universal Freedom ! Let none stand back, 
and say, ^^ I will wait until this is a noble war, — a war 
for Humanity : " let all enter, and make it a noble war, 
— make it the struggle of Humanity. Our President 
is a Resolution which the people have passed. When 
a fresh and higher clause has been added by them, it 
will be repeated by every sword and cannon that goes 
southward from Washington. Whilst the water rises to 
but twenty feet with the people, let them not expect 
it to be thirty with their representatives. As we hold 
up their hands, or fail to hold them up, the day will be 
won or lost. 

Forward, then, to the breach ! No war of Manhood 
was ever yet lost. 

The Rejected Stone, whose name is Justice to Man, 
is, in the order of God, once more offered America. It 
is for the people to give it to the master-builder, to 
be laid as the Head of the Corner in the future fabric, — 
the Republic of Man. 

That day, and that alone, which sees the Nation 
^' broken " to the measure of this stone upon which it 
has now fallen, shall see its one Foe, upon which that 
stone shall then fall, ground to powder. 



116 THE REJECTED STONE. 

XIX. 

THE GREAT METHOD OF PEACE. 

It were a sad thing if Ave should suffer the clangor 
of arms to drown that angel-choir that ever singeth of 
^^ Peace on earth, and good-will to men." We should 
indeed meet with utter indignation and execration that 
DeviPs-peace, whose white flag now seeks to disguise 
the black one of the pirate and slaver, and to divide the 
forces that rally under that which alone now floats for 
Liberty and Justice. No war, however bloody or inter- 
minable, can be so horrible as that peace offered us by 
traitors in our midst, — a peace whose quiet would be 
that of a nation's grave, whose outside repose would 
be but the cover of corruption and loathsome vermin. 
Against such a peace God has for ever set his angel 
with the sword of flame. Between him and all wrong 
there can be no peace : the white flag of peace is only 
a flag of truce. The truce may last a month, a year, 
ten years ; but between Justice and Injustice, Right 
and Wrong, Liberty and Slavery, there can only be a 
truce, — never a peace. The very field of conciliation 
invariably turns out the field of battle ; for before the 
song of ^^ Peace on earth ! " comes that of ^^ Glory to 
God in the highest ! " 

But, my friends, though not a thousandth part so bad 



THE GREAT METHOD OF PEACE. 117 

as a false peace, war is always wrong. It is sometimes, 
as now, necessary ; but not absolutely, only relatively, 
necessary, — necessary, that is, only because we know 
not the things that make for our peace. There might be 
a peace at once, — a peace consistent with our national 
honor and unity; but the means of it are hid from our 
nation's eyes. Every rebel might be disarmed to-mor- 
row. But the victories of Peace require so much more 
courage than those of war, that they are rarely won. 
When we do conquer a peace, however, it will assuredly 
be by the use of a certain sword, which, if drawn to- 
day, would win us a peace to-day, — a sword, too, which 
does not destroy, but makes alive. 

Gregory of Tours walked near the palace of Soissons 
with Sylvius, the Bishop of Albi. '^ Do you see any 
thing on that roof? '' said Sylvius. ^^ I see the standard 
which Tlilperic the king has set up," replied the monk. 
"And you see nothing else?" inquired the bishop. 
"No: do you see anything?" — "I see the sword of 
Divine Yengeance hung over that wicked house." 

So it proved ; so it will ever prove. When human 
endurance is at an end, the sentence of Heaven is close 
at hand. Such sentence is indeed pronounced through 
human lips, and executed by human hands ; but when, 
in an extremity, by the necessity that knows no law, 
or rather obeys the highest of laws, a people is driven 
to enact some mighty change in society, they consum- 
mate the decree of the Universe. By such revolution, 
God fulfils the oath he has sworn, that every wrong 



118 THE REJECTED STONE. 

shall be overtlirown, and the kingdoms of this world 
become the kingdom of his Christ for ever. 

It does not require eyes so keen as those of the old 
French bishop to see the hair-strung sword of retribu- 
tion hung over the palace of King Secession. While 
the North is now sending its young men to die on the 
battle-field^ the sword, at the sight of which Rebellion 
would ground its arms, yet sleeps in the scabbard by 
our side. That sword is Emancipation. Fear or hate 
will inevitably draw it, in the end : how much better 
that Justice and Mercy should draw it now ! The 
common sense of the nation has already rendered the 
verdict, that Slavery is the cause of this trouble ; yet 
we have forborne to touch that institution. Not only 
is Slavery the historic cause of the Rebellion, but it is 
the one thing that alone makes it practicable at the 
South. Slavery is itself essentially, and in its most 
quiet condition, a rebellion. It is a rebellion against 
the laws of this Universe, — a guilty defiance of God 
and of man. So it stood in reason before it bore its 
bitter fruits in practice. Nettle-roots sting not ; but 'tis 
their law to produce the nettles that do sting. Hence 
Slavery has not departed from its natural law in now 
seeking to lift its " bars " against ^' our banner in the 
sky." Its whole spirit and tendency is to engender 
that arrogance and self-aggrandizement which have cul- 
minated in this Rebellion. To enslave four millions is 
a suitable training for the enslavement of thirty. But, 
as we have said, it is not only the ultimate cause of 



THE GREAT METHOD OF PEACE. 119 

Secession : Slavery alone renders the present attitude 
of the South possible. It is only because a slave can 
be left at home to till the soil; that the white man is 
able to bear arms in the army. Should it be once 
announced, that every slave was, in the eye of the 
country, a free man, each Southerner would have to 
hurry home to be his own home-guard and his own 
home-provisioner. Such a measure would disband the 
Southern forces, and pin every rebel to his home. 
Their armies would soon "fold their tents, like the 
Arabs, and silently steal away." Every slave in the 
South, whether building breastworks or not, whether 
belonging to a loyalist or not, is, by the wealth and 
strength he produces in that section, really arrayed 
against the North. Some of us are hoping for an insur- 
rection down there to demoralize their army. It will 
never come. Three fully armed watchmen can secure 
a hundred slaves from consultation or rising. Hercules 
will not come and take the wheel out of the rut for us. 
Nay, more : as long as we fail to use that weapon, it is 
one whose hilt may at any critical moment be grasped 
by the South, and wielded with terrible effect. The 
Republic of Colombia placed a sword in every slave's 
hand, and proclaimed freedom to each and all who 
should rally to its defence. The South may follow 
this example ; and thus, by proving itself more the 
Negro's friend than the North, may turn our natural 
allies in their midst to our active and bitter foes. Dear 
as their slaves are to the South, the hope of conquering 



120 THE REJECTED STOXE. 

the " Yankees " is dearer ; and they would gladly give 
up the half- million males which this would free to 
insure their triumph. Should they adopt this measure, 
we should be inevitably defeated in the war. 

I feel profoundly impressed that the country should 
at once and most seriously look this matter in the face. 
In the rapid march of events, how soon may this sure 
weapon be carried beyond our reach ! I therefore 
propose to look below the surface of this matter, and 
examine some of those popular errors concerning the 
policy of emancipation which have been industriously 
circulated and fostered by the defenders of Slavery, 
and which may yet paralyze our arm in the great 
moment of its opportunity. These errors pass daily 
from tongue to tongue on our streets, in such phrases 
as " the horrors of insurrection," '' the scenes of St. 
Domingo ] " and we are constantly asked, " What could 
we do with the Negroes?'^ 

It is a little singular that Slavery has so long been 
able to keep up in the popular mind an idea that 
emancipation would bring all manner of evils and com- 
plications in its train, when the facts are so emphatically 
otherwise. The dictum is complacently announced in 
our midst, whilst nearly every civilized nation is at this 
moment enjoying the beneficent results of emancipa- 
tion. Let us see : — 

On the tenth day of October, 1811, the Congress of 
Chili decreed that every child born of slave parents 
after that date should be free. 



THE GREAT METHOD OF PEACE. 121 

On the 9tli of April, 1812, the Government of Buenos 
Ayres declared the same free who should be born after 
the 1st of January, 1813. 

On the 19th of July, 1821, the Congress of Colombia 
emancipated all the slaves who had borne arms for the 
defence of the Republic, and provided for the entire 
emancipation in eighteen years of all its slaves, — two 
hundred and eighty thousand in number. 

On the 15th of September, 1821, Mexico granted 
immediate and unconditional emancipation to all its 
slaves. 

On the 4th of July, 1827, the State of New York 
emancipated at once its ten thousand slaves. 

On the 1st of August, 1834, Great Britain emanci- 
pated, at a cost of a hundred million dollars, all the 
slaves in her West-Indian possessions, — eight hundred 
thousand in number. 

Here, now, are instances of every variety of emanci- 
pation, — immediate, gradual, conditional, unconditional; 
and it has not only yet to be shown where and when 
any scene of violence or danger followed these decrees, 
in even a single instance, but it can be shown that each 
of these countries rose after them in the national scale 
as to security and general prosperity. This has been 
particularly the case in the West Indies, about which so 
many lies have been so industriously circulated. There, 
on one glorious night, eight hundred thousand slaves 
knelt in their chapels, watching for Liberty's midnight- 
morning; and, when the midnight hour rang out, they 

11 



122 THE REJECTED STONE. 

arose freemen. The morning';^ dawn found each one at 
his usual post of labor, and ready to continue to earn 
the legitimate produce of the island. There were scenes 
of joy such as might have drawn the gaze of hovering 
angels ; there were such touching scenes as must attend 
the casting-aside of grave-clothes, — the emergence 
from the sepulchre of a people who have heard a Mes- 
siah saying, ^^ Come forth ! Unbind him, hand and 
foot ! " But there was not one scene of that rebellion 
and retribution which had been anticipated, perhaps 
because merited. 

But we hear much of the " fearful scenes of St. 
Domingo." 1 have reserved mention of this island, 
because it contains for us a higher lesson than the 
practicability of emancipation (which it also teaches) ; 
even the formidable results which may follow an at- 
tempt to thwart the policy of emancipation when any 
exigency commands it. There is, indeed, a possibility 
that '' the scenes of St. Domingo " may be repeated 
upon this continent ; and it is not hard to foretell on 
whom the responsibility of their occurrence shall rest 
in such an event. 

On the 28th of March, 1790, the National Assembly 
of France decreed that ^^ all free persons '^ of St. Do- 
mingo should have the right of suffrage. This was 
passed at the solicitation of the free colored residents 
of the island, and was meant to confer the privilege of 
voting upon them. The planters became excessively 
indignant at this grant of political privileges to the 



THE GREAT METHOD OF PEACE. 123 

free Negroes, and denied tliem the riglit to avail them- 
selves of it. Oge, a mulatto, claimed the exercise of 
the right at the head of an army. A war-cry was the 
response. At length, the planters, after the death of 
six thousand men, acquiesced ; the French Assembly 
meanvvdiile inserting the word '^ colored " in their decree 
of suffrage, so as to make its grant to the free Negroes 
unmistakable. Thus far, there was no attempt by any 
party to free the slaves ; indeed, the free Negroes had 
helped at various times to suppress the insurrection 
of slaves against those very planters with whom they 
were themselves contending. In September, 1791, the 
French Government revoked the decree of suffrage to 
the free Negroes. It was doubtless as an expedient: 
for, on the 4th of April of the next year, the decree 
of rights was again issued, and three commissioners 
with six thousand troops sent by France to St. Domingo 
to enforce it. Thereupon the planters inaugurated a 
conspiracy to place their island in the hands of England. 
The French commissioners, hearing of the approach of 
English troops, and finding that they must resist an 
assault from that power with about twenty-one thousand 
troops, on three-fourths of which (they being the militia 
of the country) they could not rely, emancipated the 
slaves, — five hundred thousand in number: a measure 
which France and England may yet, in the same way, 
compel the United States to adopt. The British evacu- 
ation of St. Domingo took place in 1798. Then Tous- 
saint POuverture became the black Washington of his 



124 THE REJECTED STONE. 

country^ securing tlio unit}^ and independence of St. 
Domingo in 1801. 

Let it be remembered, that, up to this time, there 
were no " fearful scenes " in St. Domingo, except such 
as were occasioned by an insane rebelHon of the white 
planters against the just decrees of their government ; 
and each fresh horror came of their mad conspiracy 
to transfer the island to foreign powers. The slaves, 
after their manumission by the French Commissioners, 
went on for the most part working patiently as before, 
seeking no political privileges, until this quiet was 
changed by the conspiracies of the planters to betray 
them, now to this nation, now to that, — to any that 
would re -enslave them. When their liberties were 
assaulted by Napoleon eight years after they were legal- 
ly gained, these men showed themselves worthy of those 
liberties by defending them, as brave men have done in 
every age and land ; but, with the exception of the mas- 
sacre ordered by Dessalines, — which should be laid at 
his own door, most of the Negroes recoiling from it, — 
the whole history of the Haitian Republic down to this 
day is a continuous record and attestation of French 
and English and Spanish treacheries and cruelties, — 
perfidies and cruelties persistent and almost incredible, 
— and of heroism, patience, and only too much genero- 
sity, on the part of the Negroes. 

Indeed, there never was a siege or campaign of one 
of these white nations which was not followed by out- 
rages, for the cruelty of which the records of insurrec- 



THE GREAT METHOD OF PEACE. 125 

tion furnish no parallel. In even the insurrection of 
Nat Turner, in Virginia, the violation of woman formed 
no part. In the plan of Denmark Vesey, in South Caro- 
lina, there was a stern prohibition against any wanton 
outrage ; and not a bloAv was aimed but would have been 
essential to liberation. No woman or child was ever 
slain, except it was certain they would be able to alarm 
neighborhoods, and defeat the plan of insurrection ; and 
the blow, wherever it fell, was swift, the death instant, 
where in other lands vindictive tortures have been re- 
sorted to. The motto of the Negro, in the few instances 
where he has struck for his freedom, has always been 
'■^ Liberty ^^^ never ^' VengcanceJ' In this regard, the 
mildest race in the world has been most infamously 
ylandered, or absurdly misunderstood. 

As far as any minds are haunted by the question, 
" What shall we do with the Negroes, should we free 
them ? " we have to say, that we should do with them 
just what was done in the seven cases of modern times 
already named, in each of which the same question, 
" What shall we do with them ? " cleared away like a 
phantom before the dawn of emancipation. The mea- 
sure was followed in each case by no evil, and by 
every happy result. With the South, indeed, as with 
others, the palaces of the few might shrink ; but the 
liuts of the many would expand to homes of comfort. 
Immense plantations would become smaller; but the 
little patch of ground that scarcely sustains the poor 
white of the South would be enlarged. And with this 

11* 



126 THE REJECTED STONE. 

whole false state of society would pass away the effe- 
minacy, the licentiousness, the arrogance, and general 
barbarism, w^hich are the legitimate brood of Slavery, 
and which have shown their power to make the fair- 
est and broadest country of the earth a cage of unclean 
birds. 

There is one lesson that the Negro temperament 
easily learns, and one which a long training has con- 
firmed ; that is, obedience. He may presently become 
a blind insurrectionist, and his wrath sweep like a con- 
llagration through the land: we shall then see that it 
was a false mercy to the South, and a great injustice to 
the whole country, that he was not (as he may be now^) 
transformed into a controllable power and subject of the 
nation. 

As far as their able-bodied workmen are concerned, 
there is plenty for them to do. Our broad lands North 
and South need their labor as much as ever. As far as 
the many aged and the children and invalids — who at 
present, without risk, could not remain in the South — 
are concerned, we should be more fortunate than any 
emancipating nation ever was before. Haiti sits at 
this moment waiting to help this great work ; willing to 
send her every ship to our shores, and bear to hers 
every Negro who will go. The Queen of the Antilles 
sits on her throne of plenty, — her land gilded Avith 
richest fruits, calling only for hands to gather and turn 
them into wealth, — offering every colored man who 
will come the bounty of a free voyage thither, and a 



THE GREAT METHOD OF PEACE. 127 

land-grant on liis arrival. With one word of recogni- 
tion, this Government can secure at once the peace and 
safety of both Haiti and America."^'^ 

Is it not melancholy that nations so generally wait to 
be driven by hard physical necessity to do great and 
just deeds ? The just measure, which, if done from a 
high motive and in calmness, produces pure and benefi- 
cent results to all, if done afterward, under the compul- 
sion of fear or as a measure of vengeance, brings those 
results fearfully alloyed with difficulties and dangers. 
The work that God gives us to do, we do a great deal 
better than it will be done if we send it back for him to 
do. What the French Assembly might have written 
peacefully on parchment, but refused, God soon after 
wrote with a pen of iron, and in blood-red ink, on every 



* It is almost unpardonable, indeed, that our Government has not already- 
spoken that word ; and the failure may be attributed chiefly to the fact, that we 
have nobody whose business it is to attend to such matters. It may be said, 
just here, that it is high time that another department in our Government 
should be recognized and formally created; one whose duty should be a suitable 
attention to the Slavery question, and to the momentous and complex affairs 
growing out of it day by day. We need a new Cabinet officer for this. It is 
of infinitely more importance than the Bureau for the Indians. The Govern- 
ment has already drifted hopelessly, and without any certain policy, amidst the 
fragments and snags of this half-wi-ecked institution, — one policy in Missouri, 
another in Virginia. Let the peril be provided for at once. It may l)e, before 
long, seen that the issue of our country's life or death rests with the Slavery 
question. Already it is generally felt, that, whilst there is the utmost need that 
we should have a policy on the matter to which we can adhere, there is a pain- 
ful confusion of thought among the people, and of action among their rulers, as 
to what is, or should be, the attitude of our Government toward that institution. 
Let the Government re-assure the public,- by making it certain that we shall 
not be wrecked on this rock for want of a special pilot to watch and warn. 



128 THE REJECTED STONE. 

street in Paris. When we leave it to Providence to do 
our work; Providence always brings with it a mixture 
of hell-fire^ to teach the foolish Avorld how much better 
it is to do its own work. The abolition of Slavery, 
which is almost inevitable during this war, would, if 
accomplished at this moment, unselfishly and grandly, 
simply because the w^ar-power has brought the nation 
to the one glorious moment when it can legally abolish 
it, be a peace measure : ere long it will be a fierce 
and fearful war measure, almost as painful to the party 
forced to use it as to those at whom it will be aimed. 

Ah ! if this nation but knew, in this its day, the things 
that belong to its peace ! Now they are hid from its 
eyes. Hid ; but not because they are not just before 
us ; not because it is too late to avail ourselves of them : 
they are hid because our eyes are weak and averted, 
not having the courage to look squarely before us. 
Glorious as our national uprising has been, it has not 
yet reached that pure and peaceful elevation, that, with 
a wave of the divine wand of rectitude, could sway 
without a blow the muttering Caliban of Rebellion. 

An old man lately looked upon the pale, dead face of 
his slain son, and said, " Slavery, then, has thus entered 
my own door." Into how many doors has it come ! 
Already within six months, some ten thousand young 
men of America have been sacrificed on the unholy 
altar of human bondage. Already stalwart arms are 
idle. Trade languishes at her marts, and the cry of the 
poor at the North begins to answer that of the op- 



THE GREAT METHOD OF PEACE. 129 

pressed at the South : together their voices cry to God 
and man, asking, " Men and brethren, what great good 
has this institution ever done, what good is it now doing 
or expected to do, that would make it desirable to sacri- 
fice a single human life to it, much less thousands of 
lives? What is there in Slavery that would make it 
well to sacrifice to it the bread of one weeping child, 
much less the living of thousands ? Why, oh ! why, this 
cruel tenacity to an unmitigated evil, and one which 
alone makes this war possible ? Does it make the slave- 
holder a good man, or a wise and peaceful and happy 
man ? Does it make freemen noble, brave, devoted to 
the right ? Does it add to the nation's wealth, culture, 
progress, or happiness ? Is it not an unmitigated and 
blighting curse, now heavy upon every man, woman, 
and child in this land ? Look, then, America, into the 
pallid faces of thy slain 3^oung men ; follow from home 
to home where the destroying angel has passed ; listen 
to the growing cry for work, already changing to the 
fiercer cry for bread ; see paralyzed trade and closed 
schools : and tell us what there is in human ojipression 
so sacred that its blood-splashed chariot -wheels must 
not be stayed." 

We all see plainly that our Government is led by the 
people, and that the people must first pass the great 
acts which must guide their rulers. This has always 
been tiic case where any great and solemn crisis, in- 
volving high moral principles, has arrived to a nation. 
Diplomatists and politicians never strike a great blow 



130 THE REJECTED STONE. 

for the right, except from the constraining force of 
public opinion : the wrong they do is spontaneous. If 
they must do right, they take care to explain that it 
is from military or political necessity ; but they seem 
never to fear that a measure will not be supported 
because of its unrighteousness. The heart of England 
was absolutely all aflame and seething against Slavery 
in the West Indies, whilst the Government was cold 
and impassive. One day, the petitions for emancipa- 
tion were so numerous and bulky, that it took six men 
to carry them into Parliament. Then Parliament stirred 
a little. One day afterward, it was reported that eight 
hundred thousand women of England — one for every 
slave in the West Indies — were knocking at the door 
of Parliament, and demanding the emancipation of the 
slaves. Then the Government sent them word : '^ Go 
to your homes ; the slave is free." 

There is no reason why Americans should not be 
as earnest and persistent as their English relatives. 
There is no reason why we should not have our six 
men to carry in our petitions for emancipation into the 
next Congress, and our eight hundred thousand or four 
million women besieging the Government for that peace 
which can alone repose on justice. 

Many a young man is asking in these times, " How 
can I best befriend my country?" Young man! you 
can befriend it by letting your manhood utter itself in 
word and deed ; by bearing with your whole weight, 
howsoever you can make it felt, for the liberation of 



THE GREAT METHOD OF PEACE. 131 

the slave, wliicli now means the liberation and peace 
of your country. Many a noble woman yearns to serve 
in some post of duty, and complains in her secret soul 
of the hard fate that seems to shut her out from 
places of active usefulness. Women ! remember those 
who were ^^ last at the cross, and earliest at the se- 
pulchre ; " remember those eight hundred thousand 
women who wrung from England that bright First of 
August, — the Coronal Day of Nations ; and swear a 
sacred oath to-day, that your prayer shall be heard in 
the Capitol of this nation, imploring liberty and justice 
for the slave, — the things that belong to our country's 
peace. 



THE END. 



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